1. WordCamp Europe Seville 2015;
2. Theme Check;
3. Swapping a WordPress core meta box to speed up;
4. Automattic announced a complete overhaul of VideoPress;
5. WP Auto Tagging plugin.

WordCamp Europe Seville 2015

Seville hosted at the end of last month WordCamp Europe 2015. Seville is such a beautiful city with a lot of places to visit, with a great cuisine and excellent athmosphere. The location chosen by the organizers was a very good one, a very nice hotel with great hospitality. The hotel is just few minutes walking distance from the historical city center, where the sightseeing  can begin and where there are a lot of restaurant and terraces offering a complete Spanish experience. The area becomes really crowded during the evenings and it is very fun to hang out and have a sangria or beer. WordCamp Seville didn’t bring something new, i enjoyed several of the presentations, but i also believe that some of them could have been a little more technical. Overall, the most interesting news are the following:

• an e-commerce solution will be integrated in the core
• the number of websites using WordPress is getting bigger and bigger, 28% of all the Internet’s websites are using it now
• there were a lot of good and interesting discussions about making WP more secure and about internationalisation

WordCamp ended with Karim’s (Crowd Favorite’s CEO) presentation about acquisitions and growth, a good lesson to learn before thinking of an exit plan. I noticed that the contributor’s day was really popular and the number of achievements communicated was impressive. The location where the after party took place was also nice, but too small to host all that people.

Next year, WordCamp Europe will be hosted in Vienna.

Theme Check

Respecting coding standards is such an important aspect of being a developer. I found a very nice plugin which is testing your website if it respects the best practices and standards:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/theme-check/

Swapping a WordPress core meta box to speed up

I read a very interesting article on css-tricks.com about how slow is the query reading the meta data section in admin when editing and about how this can be changed and improved. Basically the examples shows how to replace the core’s meta box with a new one and as a final result of this, the query time drops from about 2000ms to about 200ms.

You can read the entire article here: https://css-tricks.com/swapping-a-wordpress-core-meta-box-to-speed-up-editing/

Automattic announced a complete overhaul of VideoPress

VideoPress is Automattic’s video hosting service, included in the WordPress.com Premium and Business plans. The service was updated and now it brings some nice features like mobile optimization, ad-free, rich stats, customizable player. More details on http://videopress.com.

WP Auto Tagging plugin

For those who forget about adding tags to their posts, this plugin might be very interesting. Basically it creates tags by reading and splitting the post’s title. The plugin has few good features but it is still under construction as their authors are also mentioning.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-auto-tagging/