WP Engine at WordCamp Dublin 2019

WP Engine was a proud sponsor of the most recent WordCamp Dublin, which took place from October 18th – 20th. The event showcased speakers from throughout Ireland and Europe, and attendees had the opportunity to take part in a full-day workshop on WordPress, followed by two days of presentations and breakout sessions. 

A group of Austin and Limerick-based WP Engine employees (representing Product, UX, Architecture, and Engineering) were able to attend the sold-out, three-day event.   

Living customer-inspired

This year’s WordCamp Dublin was a great opportunity to learn more about the role WP Engine plays in the WordPress community and to further understand the goals and challenges that are currently top of mind for WordPress users. The interactions WP Engine employees had with other attendees confirmed many of the recent decisions we’ve made with regard to our product roadmap and uncovered some new opportunities as well. 

WP Engine has made significant investments to grow its R&D organization, and several members of the company’s R&D leadership, as well as members of its Operating System (OS) group, were able to attend the event. These team members were excited to find that their mission to build effortless and highly intuitive experiences for customers seemed to resonate well with other members of the WordPress community.  

WordPress community culture and values in action

Throughout the event, it was also clear that the ideology and mission of the open source WordPress community isn’t just lip service. The community is renowned for being welcoming and inclusive and there was a focus on accessibility and wellness throughout the event that was visibly noticeable—there were even breakout sessions for yoga and wellness and tracks on how to improve resilience and keep burnout at bay. This was a great example of an organization living out its mission within the community.

On Friday night, the sponsors’ evening at the Trinity City Hotel brought together some of our customers like MarsMedia and partners HubSpot and WooCommerce.

WP Engine is the answer… 

During the event, a number of questions came up that aptly highlighted customer pain points. Several current tools and offerings that WP Engine offers were able to provide solutions for some of these issues. For example:

• Customer need: the ability to manage multiple environments.
• Potential solution: Local (Local by Flywheel) as a way to easily manage staging, development, and production environments. 

• Customer need: managing multiple plugins and keeping them up-to-date.
• Potential solution: Smart Plugin Manager, which automatically checks plugins for updates, installs them when needed, and uses visual regression testing to make sure upgrades are completed without issue.

• Customer need: SEO was a large focus of the audience—how could they see better results online? 
• Potential solution: StudioPress themes, Genesis Framework—offering rapid site setup, SEO optimized themes, security, and flexibility.

• Customer need: Security for WordPress, prevention against DDoS attacks, etc.
• Potential solution: Global Edge Security, which provides a high-performance, advanced security solution designed to keep WordPress sites secure while delivering a faster experience for customers.
• Customer need: More and more people are looking to WordPress for help with headless architecture.
• Potential solution: WP Engine helps enterprise customers utilize WordPress as a central hub for larger headless solutions. Come hear WP Engine Founder and CTO Jason Cohen speak more about headless options for WordPress at WP Engine’s EU Summit next month. 

 WP Engine Limerick will also host the next WordPress meetup. Stay tuned for more details over the coming weeks—check out the Dublin WordPress Group on Meetup. 

All of our WP Engine teams were so grateful for the opportunity to attend and look forward to sharing their insights and applying what they learned to the next wave of efforts to drive us forward on our mission of being the best Digital Experience Platform for WordPress.