Follow-up: WordCamp Bucharest 2018 (2018.10.27-28, Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Romania) #wcbuc

Between 27^th and 28^th of October, 2018, took place WordCamp Bucharest 2018, an event dedicated to WordPress at the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Romania.

See the Google Photos Albums I made here:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/RbvwNvXj4fZ4XBEf7

See the Facebook Album I made here:
https://www.facebook.com/olivian.breda/media_set?set=a.10155886791543441&type=3

Below, my notes at the event.

My notes at the event

Marius Vetrici, Claudiu Dăscălescu, Rodica-Elena Andronache – Introduction

~300 sold tickets.

Ivana Ćirković – What’s your story?

Telling stories is inspiring people.

Apple, AirBnb, Coca-Cola, Lego, Nike tell a story with their product. It’s not just a product.

A good story is:

Simple.
Provoking emotions.
Honest, trusting.
Real.
Relevant to the target group.

Your story needs to be adapted very well to the online areas.

Anatomy of a perfect written story:

Headline.
Meta description.
Content.
Photo / Visual.
Call-To-Action (CTA) – tell people what you want from them. You can ask, for example, for a newsletter subscription from your visitors.
Social sharing.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Tools to use:

Grammarly.
Hemingway.
Canva.
Piktochart.
Social media networks (various, to be adapted per client).

WordPress and storytelling:

It’s free.
You can use themes, widgets, plugins.
SEO-friendly.
Playing with content – Gutenberg. (you should download Gutenberg & test it)

Seth Godin: “Marketing is no longer about the stuff that you make, but about the stories you tell.” (via)

Emanuel Blagonic – How to find peace and change the world

In 2003 we used Internet Explorer, there were no web standards, no responsive technologies.

In 2012, he became a parent.

Then, a breaking point came, very hard issues.

Inspiring video:

When you have problems, you might imagine:

You’re the only one with problems.
Your problems are very difficult to overcome and impact you a lot.

But, if you look at a problem from a larger scale:

You will see that others have similar, sometimes bigger problems.
Your problems are not that great.

5 rules:

Family comes first.
Don’t stress yourself over things you can’t control.
Leave your comfort zone, and challenge yourself.
Help yourself, so you can help others. (“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.” ― Mahatma Gandhi)
Give unconditionally.

Bonus rules:

Look up to the people that can teach you new things.
Live every day as your last one.
Never ever give up. (“And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.” ― Abraham Lincoln)

Călin Don – Automating WordPress Operations with Kubernetes

Main topic: https://github.com/presslabs/stack

On the market since 2007.

Want to democratize WordPress hosting.

They needed metrics in order to properly scale.

Their solution was released at WordCamp Vienna, 2018.

Owning your stack:

Implement rules & regulations (GDPR, HIPAA)
Moving closer to your audience.
You can move easy between providers without risking data integrity.
The things which can break can grow exponentially with each increase in the number of layers between you and your site’s visitors.

The 5-minute WordPress install is good, but what happens when you need to perform 100 installs?

Golden rule: “backups are not real unless you can restore data from them”.

You should test restoring your files.

You can’t scale without monitoring.

Monitoring / alerting – important items.

If you mean business, you should take security very seriously.

Kubernetes is an open-source solution since 2014. It is the brain behind Google’s infrastructure. It is easy to install on laptops/datacentres.

PressLabs stacks – 5 operators (they automatize human tasks).

Recap:

Scaling = efficiency in resource usage.
Automation = less technical accidents.
Open-source = community & ownership.

Andrei Lupu – Before and Beyond Gutenberg

Content is the center of WordPress Universe.

Rightnow, WordPress uses TinyMCE. This was launched in 2004.

WordPress’ competitors use more modern editors.

They have been using in WordPress the same editor for about 15 years.

The content type we use right now has changed.

Nowadays, the content has evolved – emojis, tweets, video, maps, forms.

We are now writing not only paragraphs but dynamic content.

WordPress tries to democratize publishing.

The transition (learning curve) from shortcodes to content blocks should be simple & easy.

We will use modern tools like React, and similar.

WordPress used to be known for a principle like “leave no one behind” (high compatibility with browsers), but there might be issues with JS (JavaScript) support in the future.

Right now they are taking into account autosave, but it’s not yet implemented.

To learn React might be simple, but you will need to learn JS.

Mitko Kochkovski – AJAX-ing your (Woocommerce) website

AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It’s a client-side technology that communicates with the server.

It loads server data without reloading the page.

It is generally considered as secure.

Yannick Gaultier – AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages): it’s getting faster!

With AMP, you can get dramatic load-time reductions.

AMP = a UI framework meant for speed.

Pure HTML, JS, super-optimized – with restrictions.

A bit like BootStrap 4, Foundation, Semantic – UI, React, Vue.js.

On another hand, it is build most of the times automatically by your web site.

You can have just a bit of CSS – Cascading Style Sheets. (nothing like BootStrap or Semantic-UI. Your own visual design)

Founded by Google at the end of 2015.

Currently, only 20% of the code is by Google, the rest is made by others.

Works the same on mobile/desktop.

To check: https://ampbyexample.com/.

Google & Bing cache your AMP pages.

AMP content is provided by 25M+ websites.

Advantages of using AMP:

SEO advantage – position “0” in SERP.
Visibilty in SERP – AMP carousels.
You will have a better conversion rate if your web site loads faster.

Automatic provieds a basic plugin. There are some others.

Workflow:

The plugin converts on the fly what it can.
It removes anything else.
Limited interactions, navigation etc.

Your AMP experience should be similar with the original web site – similar design, working menus, search engine box, the SERP should be AMP, not the website’s SERP, next/previous page links.

The worst thing to do – install AMP and have no navigation, no search, and the design is identical to other pages on the Internet.

You should always validate your AMP.

Gotchas (things to check for):

Content mismatch – not the same content on standard / AMP pages.
For Google Analytics you will need to use AMP Client ID API.
For Carousels, the article image required must be 1200 pixels in width.

New: Progressive Web Apps:

Fit perfectly with AMP.
App-like website.
Offline features.

New: AMP Stories:

Don’t need a AMP website.
Attractive & easy to do.
Soon in Google results. (soon you will be able to be on position “0” on SERP)
Just a web page – it can be shared & works everywhere.

Ana-Maria Udriște – Is GDPR such a boo-hoo for online businesses?

GDPR aims to have an uniform policy all across the European Union (EU).

Regulation at EU-level. Started in May 2018.

“Processing” data – receive, look, store, anything with handling.

About “personal” data, there are layers of identification:

First name + faculty – might be personal, but might be not.
Full name + faculty + university – this most surely is personal data, you can identify a person with this data.

Legitimate interest takes a special understanding – if you can demonstrate that your interest is bigger than individual’s interest, it may be fine to collect data. For example, let’s say you ask for a phone number and you want to use that for cold calling. If you can demonstrate that your use of phone numbers increases the turnover of the company, and this provides your employees’ jobs, you might be able to use the data.

Tips:

Your demonstration case can be very simple.
You will need to demonstrate that turnover from call calling is higher than using emails for contact purposes.

Retargeting on Facebook – as long as you can demonstrate you have an interest in this and this provides a positive outcome, it may be fine.

You need to separate:

Marketing permitions tickbox.
Terms & conditions tickbox. They shouldn’t be a single tickbox.

You need to be able to demonstrate that you electronic consent was given to you on a specific date – keep the records.

The checkboxes shouldn’t be pre-ticked.

An option to mark all tickboxes at once – this is fine.

If a 12-year old doesn’t understand your privacy policy, that might be a problem. You should write your terms and conditions page and your privacy policy with your own words. Plain-speak only.

Why do we need consent?

It is easy to be obtained (just ticking a box).
Individuals have full control of their data.
Can be withdrawn hassle-free.

Withdrawing consent via email is fine.

If you have a database with emails obtained prior to GDPR, that may be fine to use, if you previously asked for permission.

There are two kinds of opt-in:

“Classical” opt-in.
Soft opt-in (social media gatherings, events). You can send them an email if:
- The are subscribed to your database, not other party’s.
- They subscribed to your database looking for something similar to what you send them currently.
- Your subscribers list is not older than two years old (it can be older if you used to send them periodical emails to keep them in the loop, but if you haven’t communicated with them for years, and now you start sending emails, this is not expected behavior).
- The unsubscribe link in your emails works fine.

Most websites are affected by GDPR. You should tell people what you do with their data.

Sometimes, it might be OK not to force people to agree to your terms and conditions, it depends on the context. You should know very well your business interest.

If you block people from using your app if the user doesn’t agree to terms and conditions, you should inform them about this.

About the cookie consent – it shouldn’t be pre-conditioned. If you just inform people that you use cookies, with no option to un-tick, that’s not fine.

You can ask for consent for anything.

Email / IP address are personal information. There are exceptions (office@company.com), but the general rule is that they are personal information.

“Data erasure” means putting data aside. Think of it as a “blacklist”, you don’t need to delete everything, in all situations.

Aleksandar Savkovic – Agile habits not frameworks

No statistics in this presentation. Why? Because 84% of statistics in presentations are fictional. Including this one.

Procedures & frameworks help to humanize an industry.

Why? Because we lie and we lie a lot. But we lie to make the world feel better.

In company culture, a lot of times middle & top management says employees come first.

In reality, employees feel:

Alone.
Pressure to deadlines.
There is little transparency.
Teambuilding doesn’t work.

Kanban for businesses & scaling up.

Tip: Scrum Methodology.

Daily huddle – what I did yesterday, what am I doing today, who/what is blocking me, a quantifiable statistic/number.

Scrum for products and development teams:

Development teams should be 3-9 people. “[Jeff] Bezos won’t call a meeting, or even go to a meeting, if two pizzas wouldn’t feed the entire group” (via)
Everything is time-boxed.

Bottleneck is always at the top – CEOs matter a lot in bottlenecks.

He claims he knows best.
He thinks he at least thinks better than the others.
Everybody should listen to the CEO.
He/she is a role-model, he/she thinks.

Why are you paying your employees if you don’t trust them to take decisions?

CEO:

At the beginning of a company, the CEO does everything. (Developer / Product Manager / COO / CFO / HR / Recruiter / Promoter).
5+ employees – he is only developer / product manager.
15+ employees – only product manager.
50+ employees – CEO is just CEO. Aim – up to infinity and beyond. (“Top management should only keep everyone in line with the #1 goal.”)

The culture inside:

Positive feed-back culture.
Strictly and clearly defined positions.
Transparency across the whole company.

Positive feed-back feels good, opposite of negative feed-back.

You should assume misunderstandings – don’t get mad everytime something bad happens.

Review results, not the person.

If someone does something bad, they may be having a bad day.

Point and shift – if you see an issue, also give a solution.

Tip to read: Impostor syndrome. It kills company culture.

Company culture = the sum of attitudes, customs and beliefs that distinguishes one group of people from another.

If you want to see corporate blah-blah, look for “team-player” on job posts on LinkedIn. About diversity – “diversity is awesome unless you’re different”.

The CEO shouldn’t hire people.

Horia Neagu – WordPress & SEO – At Long Last Love

5 problems which prevent websites from appearing in Google:

Page speed.
Images.
Code.
Structure.
SEO mistakes.

You should enable browser caching (via .htaccess or WordPress plugin W3 Total Cache).

You should minify HTML, CSS, JS (tip – you can download minified versions by testing your web site with Google Page Speed).

Too many plugins can slow down a website.

SEO quick wins:

Load JS a at the end of the page & asynchronously.
Use CSS sprites.
Don’t embed Twitter / Facebook feeds on page.
Use DNS prefetching.
Test page speed with:
- GT Metrix.
- Pingdom.
- Google Analytics (you can see reports).
- Mobile test speed from Google.
- HAR analyzer.

You should resize images prior to uploading them.

Use GZip compression.

Avoid having too many plugins in your WordPress installation.

Plugins which use a lot of resources:

WPML (translation plugin; you can use instead TranslatePress – my tip).
BackupBuddy (use All-in-One WP Migration)
Broken Link Checker (use Screaming Frog or, my tip, scan your web site with XENU and import the CSV in list-mode in Screaming Frog to scan more than 500 URLs for free).
Contact Form 7 (use Caldera Forms).
WPBakery Page Builder.
Revolution Slider (avoid using sliders).

Specialized plugins for speed:

TinyPNG.
WP Smush.

For images, dont’t forget filename, title and ALT tags.

In Chrome, open Dev Tools. Show the Console Drawer. Click Coverage, to see the useless code (code which you load with your page, but don’t actually use it).

Delete WordPress revisions.

301 redirects are much better than 404s.

Use XML sitemaps.

Use breadcrumb navigations (my tip – also use Schema.org tags for it).

Use Schema.org.

Use rel=next/prev tags for pagination.

SEO is more than Yoast SEO plugin and getting a green dot for checking your keyword optimization.

Mario Peshev – Tips For Successful Enterprise WordPress Projects

Pros:

Brand awareness and reputability.
Solving problems at a larger scale.
Potentially long-term contracts.
Better pay thanks to the ROI opportunities.

Cons:

NDAs and SLAs.
Long, tedious iterations, continuous meetings, back-and-forth for standard operations.
Potentially a lot of paperwork for one-off builds.
Pay may be standard in case of bidding and RFPs with competitors underpricing just because of the brand’s visibility.

How to define your proposition:

Define your perfect profile on your target company.
Business process of the enterprise.
Define a realistic business model.

Do you want to be a vendor (sub-contracting) or a partner (more reasonable)?

Consider your approach a lot.

Paperwork is crucial.

You can use open-source code which you find online, but it might have security issues.

See: OWASP Top 10 Application Security Risks – 2017.

3S: Speed / Security / Stability.

You can ask for upfront payment.

Generally, you need someone either in management/sales with enterprise background in your company.

WordPress can handle millions of views per month.

Andrey Savchenko – WordPress breaks time (and how to fix it)

In WordPress, if you change time in general settings, you break time.

Everyone on the planet agrees to UTC, which is a thing which rarely happens (agreement on a single issue).

Unix time – time in seconds since 1970-01-01, midnight.

Unix time:

Consistent.
Storage-friendly.
Comparison-friendly.
Not human readable.

In PHP – DateTime.

wp_date – an initiative to fix up and improve Date/Time component of WordPress core.

Conclusions:

WordPress gets time storage & output wrong.
Read UTC time.
Write timestamp, UTC, RFC 3339.
Use DateTime to operate time.
Use WpDateTime to bridge WordPress and PHP.
Hope update works out.

If you change timezones from Europe to another Europe country, the biggest problems might be one hour differences, and they don’t matter as much. If you change Europe to Asia, the problems will be bigger.

Georgios Gkouvousis – Setting up the ideal webserver for WordPress: from zero to hero!

Actual need – faster responses.

Gold rule: the faster the WordPress, the better.

Page speed matters because:

The web site loads faster.
Better UX (User eXperience).
Better rankings in SERP.
Less resources.
Happier users.
Happier webmasters.

Side improvements:

Faster webserver (move from Apache to NGINX).
Latest PHP version (opcache).
Up-to-date MySQL version.
HTTP/2 protocol.
DOM improvement. (JS at the bottom of the page, asynchronous loading)

Recommended plugin – W3 Total Cache.

Vineet Talwar – Progressive Web Apps : The future of Mobile Apps

When people come to your website, you want them to have a smooth experience. If you launch a mobile app, there will be a great deal of problems you will face.

Progressive Web Apps (PWA) are a solution to some of these problems: reliable, fast, engaging.

You should be using https:// everywhere.

You can have push notifications with:

With PWA you can go offline.

Who uses it?

Twitter.
Instagram.
Google Maps.
Uber.
Lyft.

PWA – more customers, more revenue.

Since the Windows Store is lagging behind, Microsoft puts emphasis on PWA. Bing will likely crawl them in the future.

Almost all modern browsers are supporting it.

WordPress’ market share is 32% of all websites.

Issues – what to do if you want to create an app for iPhone/iPad and you don’t have a Mac and can’t install XCode? Android Studio might be slow to install on PCs.

Before publishing your PWA on Android, you need to sign your app. On XCode, you need a paid developer account.

Not sure if you need PWA? Test it.

Plugin – Progressive WordPress (PWA) | WordPress.org.

GitHub – pwa-builder/ManifoldJS: Node.js tool for App Generation or Cordova.

Testing:

Lighthouse test.
Your browser simulator.
Android Studio or XCode Device Simulator.
AWS Device Farm.
Real Device.

Cătălin Matei – Why And How to Use Social Media to Create a Brand and Revenue!

Social media (SM) is huge.

People spend 2h+ / day surfing SM. 80+ times / day.

Digital marketing spend: $250B / year. Projected: $450 B / year by 2022.

Paid search is relatively cheap (still).

Branding helps businesses have customers skip some steps in the marketing funnel.

You can create value to customers if you can provide value & relationships before people have a problem.

Some ideas for content marketing:

Product tutorials (plugin / theme tutorials, for example).
Product testimonials / reviews – either text/video.
Industry news or content series – video (very important) or text.
Marketplace – use Facebook / Google / Instagram Pixels.
Medium content.
Repurpose website articles – you can create infographics, a photo with a small piece of text with a “read more” link.
Native advertising – go to Google Analytics – referrals and look who is sending you sales. Promote that content.
Personal branding.

LinkedIn used to be used as a place for posting CVs. After being bought by Microsoft for $26.2 billion (via), they want to transform it into a content platform.

Profile to check out for having an active subscriber base on LinkedIn: Andriy Burkov.

When Facebook puts drones on remote areas, they have a business incentive to do that.

Facebook works if you can get people to share your content/comment long, thoughtful comments.

Generally, you need to pay for exposure on Facebook.

Remarketing is called retargeting on Facebook, just to differentiate from others.

On your ads, you should use social proofs – reviews, video reviews. Another tip – product demos.

For e-commerce, you should use dynamic product ads.

If the market is very competitive, you should create content and find niches. A €10,000 budget should be spent 50% on content, 50% on promotion in this case.

Problem with YouTube – it is very hard to get to the top, on an international level. In Romania, it is not so crowded yet.

If you have international videos, consider Facebook, and IGTV (Instagram’s video solution).

You can repurpose videos you make on YouTube on Instagram, by making them much shorter.

Agenda:

Saturday, October 27^th – Conference, @Al. I. Cuza Amphitheatre, CCIR:

09:30 – What’s your story? – Ivana Ćirković
10:00 – How to find peace and change the world – Emanuel Blagonic
10:30 – Automating WordPress Operations with Kubernetes – Călin Don
11:30 – Before and Beyond Gutenberg – Andrei Lupu
12:00 – AJAX-ing your (Woocommerce) website – Mitko Kochkovski
12:30 – AMP: it’s getting faster! – Yannick Gaultier
13:00 – Is GDPR such a boo-hoo for online businesses? – Ana-Maria Udriște
14:30 – Agile habits not frameworks – Aleksandar Savkovic
15:00 – WordPress & SEO – At Long Last Love – Horia Neagu
15:30 – Tips For Successful Enterprise WordPress Projects – Mario Peshev
16:00 – WordPress breaks time (and how to fix it) – Andrey Savchenko
17:00 – Setting up the ideal web server for WordPress: from zero to hero! – Georgios Gkouvousis
17:30 – Progressive Web Apps: The future of Mobile Apps – Vineet Talwar
18:00 – Why And How to Use Social Media to Create a Brand and Revenue! – Cătălin Matei

Sunday, October 28^th – Contributor Day:

10:30 – Contributor Day @Basarabia Hall, CCIR

Location

Location: Day 1 – Conference Venue – Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Romania Business Center – Al. I. Cuza Amphitheatre (fourth floor).
Day 2 – Contributors Day (28 October) – Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Romania Business Center – Basarabia Hall ( ground floor )
Address: 2 Octavian Goga Blvd., 3rd District, Bucharest, 030982 România
The Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Romania is one of the most important forums for representing Romanian businessmen for the last 150 years. As a component of the free market economy, the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Romania tended to the development of the business environment and also, of Romania.

Organizers

Cristian Midvichi, Bogdan Fireteanu, Vlad Ilie, Rodica-Elena Andronache, Cezar Cazan, Radu Cananau, Cătălin Secoșan, Claudiu Dăscălescu, Mihai Apetrei, Marius Vetrici, Alexandra Giula.

Speakers

Andrei Lupu is a backend developer at ThemeIsle who loves to tackle to most challenging tasks and to grind on unsolvable puzzles. With more than eight years of experience in web development and a dozen WordPress plugins and themes created, Andrei finds real value in open-source code and shareable knowledge.
Because his mantra is “Learn a new thing every day” he has the perfect excuse to lose a fair amount of time on StackOverflow and Slack channels but is the same mantra that guides him to love WordCamps and WordPress.
The topic of Andrei’s presentation is “Before and Beyond Gutenberg“.

Mario Peshev is a tech entrepreneur and the founder of DevriX, a distributed team of 35 scaling large WordPress platforms. He’s been hacking code over the past 15 years (including 30+ patches in the WordPress Core), teaching tech and business courses at universities and companies like VMware, SAP, Saudi Aramco, blogging on WordPress and management topics, and everything in-between. Mario is a proud supporter of dog-friendly office environments and the father of Tina, a cute 10-month old girl.
The topic of Mario’s presentation is “Tips For Successful Enterprise WordPress Projects“.

Călin Don is a perfectionist, language-agnostic day-and-night code tinkerer, loving and hating WordPress since 2005. Since 2011 he has been building a complex infrastructure to host demanding WordPress sites, in the CTO’s and co-founder’s shoes of Presslabs. Now he’s on a mission to simplify and open a scalable WordPress setup that powers millions of page views. He likes skiing in the Austrian Alps, swimming and making road-trips with his family.
The topic of Călin’s presentation is “Automating WordPress Operations with Kubernetes“

Georgios Gkouvousis is a talented Full Stack Developer, with more than 10 years of WordPress development experience.
He is managing some of the most serious WordPress projects within Greece & London, serving world wide web, tons of megabytes every single day through awesome websites.
Co-founder of 8web.gr, WPML Contractor and rtCamp’s EasyExpert. Occasional speaker at technology conferences, Google Partner and Huffpost’s author.
The topic of Georgios’s presentation is “Setting up the ideal web server for WordPress: from zero to hero!“.

Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko is a WordPress contractor from Kiev, Ukraine.
He believes in a Web of content sites that are a delight to discover, read, and navigate. For that, he works with other developers on complex tasks and long-term value goals. His services include: make it fast, automate menial, stare down a legacy codebase, fix the world (one bug at a time).
In his free time, he likes to drink tea, read science fiction and every tweet in his timeline.
The topic of Andrey’s presentation is “WordPress breaks time (and how to fix it)“

Ivana Ćirković is a Digital Marketing, PR and Social Media consultant with over ten years experience in the field. She is also a WordPress enthusiast, one of the WCEU 2018 organizers and an active member of the WordPress community who lives online almost 24/7.
The topic of Ivana’s presentation is “What’s your story?“.

Ana-Maria Udriște is a lawyer and entrepreneur. She graduated from the Faculty of Law of the University of Bucharest, with a master’s degree in Judicial Career and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in competition law. In 2016, she left the traditional legal services market and founded U-Legal (a law firm offering legal services in the field of law of competition, business law, IP law & tech law), respectively Avocatoo (where students and professionals explain legal notions in plain language). That same year she became co-founder of Jurio, the biggest case-law platform with an advanced search engine designed to make legal research easier and less time-consuming.
Her qualities as an entrepreneur brought Ana’s entry for Forbes 30 under 30 top (April 2017) and the Financial Times: New Europe 100: Eastern Europe’s Emerging Technology Stars (November 2017). At the same time, she is a lenient attorney in competition law and business law. Passioned by technology, she always tried to pursue her dreams of #makinglawsimple, and thus co-authored, with Ruxandra Sava (LegalUp) the first Romanian complete GDPR KIT.
The topic of Ana-Maria’s presentation is “Is GDPR such a boo-hoo for online businesses?“.

Cătălin Matei is an entrepreneur and the CEO of Increase Media, a full-service social media agency that works with International and Romanian brands to help them adapt their marketing for digital and social media. He chose the entrepreneurial road when he was only 16 years old, founding e-commerce and software businesses. Catalin believes in the importance of helping others and thinks that every day is an opportunity to learn something new.
The topic of Cătălin’s presentation is “Why And How to Use Social Media to Create a Brand and Revenue!“.

Horia Neagu is Owner & Digital Marketing Consultant at Napoleon. Digital, with over 12 years of experience in SEO, with a focus on technical optimization, SEO auditing, SEO strategy, content marketing, and CRO. He has had a passionate love affair with WordPress since 2007, back when it was nicknamed “Ella” and the autosave feature was an amazing novelty.
Horia is a hopeless geek, with a passion for public speaking, who honestly believes that bad web design ought to be criminalized. It is his conviction that WordPress can save the world, one site at a time and his motto is “plans are useless, planning is everything.”
The topic of Horia’s presentation is “WordPress & SEO – At Long Last Love“.

Mitko Kochkovski started working with WordPress in 2010. He is a Codeable expert and founder of webpigment.com. He loves creating unusual websites, especially with WooCommerce.
The topic of Yannick’s presentation is “AJAX-ing your ( Woocommerce ) website“.

Aleksandar Savkovic. Google helped me to understand that WordPress is the next big thing in my life.
So I reconsidered my profession and from the construction site supervisor, I became the Web “WordPress” developer at the age of 34.
I believe that BIO should be seen as an ongoing process.
Rather than a static snapshot, whereby we are perpetually re-framing, re-thinking and re-considering ourselves.
At the moment I’m Western Balkans Manager at Enartia.com, a group of brands and coaching the dev team in a better tasks execution. Thank you, Scrum.
The topic of Aleksandar’s presentation is “Agile habits not frameworks“.

Yannick Gaultier. Initially trained as a mechanical engineer, I spent 20 years in a non-IT industry. I then started some web projects, mostly PHP and various CMS, and mostly centered around SEO. This was a hobby in 2006, but 3 years later, and to this date, it became my full-time job. I run a small company handling development and support for our open source CMS plugins.
Seeing how important Accelerated Mobile Pages was to become we developed an advanced WordPress AMP plugin at the end of 2016 to enable AMP pages on sites with both a lot of ease and a high degree of customization.
The topic of Yannick’s presentation is “AMP: it’s getting faster!“.

Vineet Talwar found his love for WordPress after he was introduced to it by a friend. This led him to develop numerous websites and making him want to crave for more to learn in WordPress. He has been associated with WordPress since 2012. He co-founded his first company at the age of 20. He is the Co-Founder and Technical Lead of FireMud FM, which is an online radio station based purely out of WordPress and Indicium Crest – A remote web–development agency which is, again focused on WordPress. Now handing both the companies on the technical front, his love for WordPress has just grown if nothing else. He has worked with over 55 projects remotely managing and developing them. He has also been associated with various ventures consulting and guiding them with technical resources and is currently located in Frankfurt, Germany.
Apart from developing the websites, he is a hobbyist photographer.
The topic of Vineet’s presentation is “Progressive Web Apps: The future of Mobile Apps“

Emanuel Blagonic – For the past 15 years, Emanuel worked with worldwide clients ranging from small, family-owned businesses to global corporations. He designed websites and applications to deliver solutions that are now being used by millions of users. As one of the pioneers of the web standards movement in Croatia, he is active in the community where he works on building a better understanding of the design process and educates clients as much as possible.
Although primarily a designer, he’s been in love with WordPress for more than 10 years, being one of the biggest promoters in Croatia – writing articles about WordPress and the importance of open source in general. He helps organize WordCamps and Meetups in Croatia and was part of WordCamp Europe organizing team three years in a row.
Can be found on Twitter as @eblagonic.
The topic of Emanuel’s presentation is “How to find peace and change the world“

Expected Behavior at the event:
– Be considerate, respectful, and collaborative.
– Refrain from demeaning, discriminatory or harassing behavior and speech.
– Be mindful of your surroundings and of your fellow participants. Alert conference organizers if you notice a dangerous situation or someone in distress.
– Participate in an authentic and active way. In doing so, you help to create WordCamp Bucharest and make it your own.

Unacceptable Behavior:
– Unacceptable behaviors include: intimidating, harassing, abusive, discriminatory, derogatory or demeaning conduct by any attendees of WordCamp Bucharest and related events. All WordCamp Bucharest venues may be shared with members of the public; please be respectful to all patrons of these locations.
– Harassment includes: offensive verbal comments related to gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, disability; inappropriate use of nudity and/or sexual images in public spaces (including presentation slides); deliberate intimidation, stalking or following; harassing photography or recording; sustained disruption of talks or other events; inappropriate physical contact, and unwelcome sexual attention.

This Code of Conduct is a direct swipe from the awesome work of Open Source Bridge, but with our event information substituted. The original is available online and is released under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

PS: 94% of 2017 attendees said they would come back (we can’t wait to see you all!)