It was fun, attending Wordcamp Europe in Berlin again. After my last Wordcamp in Vienna in 2016 I was curious: Where is WordPress heading? What did I learn?
on the way to WCEU 
registration quickly finished
Complexity increases
Gutenberg added a new layer of complexity to WordPress. And a lot of frameworks are now part of the CMS. But also CSS is more and more preprocessed before going live and the days, with handcoded CSS-files seem almost over. Or as the speaker Daniel Kanchev puts it: „Successful software never gets simpler.“ This increases the risk of potential security-issues and makes the code harder to take care about. More complex code on the other hand also means more features and it basically means WordPress becomes more powerful.
Gutenberg is the way to go now
Matt Mullenweg at WCEU 2019
Gutenberg is here and is still perceived as somewhere in beta-phase from some of the attendees, I met. Only a part of all attendees had been checking out Gutenberg, while it was still in plugin-phase. And to be honest, I was also only having a quick look around at that time. To many bugs. But now Gutenberg is part of WordPress’s core and the conference was packed with Gutenberg-Stuff and most of the attendees seemed to embrace Gutenberg. As Mat Mullenweg announced that WordPress is supposed to become multilingual, it is going to be an interesting time for multilanguage-plugin-developers.
main stage 
timetable 
accessibility workshop 
parts of the berlin wall 
Blocks will become more sophisticated
Gutenberg’s main concept of creating and arranging content was a major part of this Wordcamp. Many of the talks were about Gutenberg blocks and their creation. I also attended a workshop titled Creating a Gutenberg block. Here you could again get a view at the increased complexity of WordPress. The workshop was packed with libraries, APIs and of course a lot of JavaScript. The roadmap for blocks includes a block-browser to dynamically select plugin-blocks from plugins, that are not installed yet.
wapu stickers 
stage 2 
lunchbreak at Estrell 
Content
Every Wordcamp always has something to offer if you create content most of your time. Even, if the borders are not always clear if you come from content to design to code. The workshop about accessibility was somewhere in between: Accessibility reaches from proper code with correct tags to subtitles for your videos to transcripts of audio. Looking back I enjoyed the workshops more than the talks themselves. A more hands-on-experience that was not available in WCEU 2016.
Conference-Language was english.
So I say thank your for the lovely event and of course the T-Shirt. I’m happy to see WordPress advancing from year to year!