WordPress

WordCamp Europe 2016 Slides & Photos

Last Friday, I presented a talk about the Japanese WordPress community at WordCamp Europe 2016 in Vienna.

The video will be published on WordPress.tv at some point. Meanwhile, here are some points for those who had missed it:

  • Japanese is the most widely used non-English WP locale (12.3% of non-English locales)
  • WordPress is by far the most popular CMS in Japan today (78.5% share – higher number compared to 59.5% for English sites)
  • Meetups are held almost every weekend somewhere in Japan. We make it easy to see events across Japan through the WordBench website and the event calendar. Many of the chapters create unique banners for each event.
  • The online community is also active, with many contributors on translation, documentation, support, bug fix & report, and Wapuu too!
  • Show others how to get involved, recognize their hard work, and help out.
  • Your own contribution can be multiplied if you help others to contribute. It’s necessary to grow the community for WordPress to succeed.

It was a pleasure to have had an opportunity to share what I’ve seen in the local community for the past 13 years. As I said in the talk, my goal is to help others contribute to WordPress so the “small steps” of more people can build up to form a long stride. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions!

Day 0 (WCEU Picnic) Photos

Francesca and I hosted a picnic at Burggarten near the venue on Thursday.

#wceupicnic #wceu #wceu2016

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Day 1 Photos

Petya’s opening remarks
WCEUBall wapuu
Event venue
MuseumsQuartier
Giant wapuu
Closed caption typists
Sergey
Wapuu stickers & coloring book
Matt & Brian
Kel

Day 2 Photos

The childcare support at WCEU this year was really great.

Francesca Marano on Italian Community
Child care room
WCEUBall
WCEU banner at night

Thanks #wceu organizing team for arranging a visit to the children's museum. It was fun! 💕

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Photos: Contributor Day

Having discussion face-to-face was the best part of the Contributor Day.

Polyglots rooms
Local coffee
Polyglots wapuu
Bego
Bego and Birgit

WordPress Meetup Tokyo: November 2015

Last night, I co-organized the 24th WordPress Meetup Tokyo. This meetup group for English speakers hosts smaller and more intimate get-togethers compared to WordBench Tokyo, which is in Japanese.

Toru did a presentation on the upcoming WordPress version 4.4 with an emphasis on the responsive image feature, based on his talk at WordCamp Tokyo last month. I showed a couple quick demos on how WordPress post embed works and the new Twenty Sixteen theme.

WordPress 4.4 embed test post

A screenshot from my test site, displaying a WordPress post embed on the Twenty Sixteen theme.

Next speaker was Sarah Cada from the Philippines. I met her when I was at WordCamp Philippines 2012 and kept in touch through our mutual friend (now a coworker) Andrew. Sarah came in as a special guest to this meetup while she’s visiting Tokyo as a part of her first trip to Japan. She talked about her involvement in the Philippine Web Designers Organization, the state of local web communities, and painfully slow internet connection there 😛

Jeff Crawford shared his experience building a business site using a theme from Thrive Themes. Jeff had shown me his site Connect-Local with another choice of a theme at a previous meetup, but this time he said he’s really happy with the ease of customization.

He also mentioned other WYSIWYG customizable themes he had tried: OptimizePress and Beaver Builder.

Junko from Kagawa joined us, and Ichi from Meetup.com Japan was also there

At WordPress Meetup Tokyo with Sarah, Mayuko, Junko. なかなかない組み合わせ！

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The next meetup is not yet scheduled, but be sure to join the meetup group if you’re interested in getting a notification about it.

ギャラリー

WordPress Meetup Tokyo, March 2014

At WordPress Meetup Tokyo in Coworking Space Co-Edo this Saturday, we had 6 speakers present a wide range of topics from Asian WordPress communities to tips on successful web development in a Japanese work environment.

Some links:

After the meetup, we went to Taishoken Chinese restaurant nearby and continued chatting about WordPress 🙂

The next meetup will be on May 24th, and we’ll discuss different ways of building a multilingual site. Please RSVP on Meetup.com and join us.

WordPress Meetup Tokyo – March 2014: Optimization Show and Tell

We had the 11th WordPress Meetup Tokyo in Co-Edo on Saturday (almost one year since we started the group!). Today’s topic was WordPress Optimization and we had 4 speakers.

WordPress Meetup Tokyo (Photo by Koji Tanaka)
Stefan
Toru

Some links are posted on the Meetup.com event page, so I’ll post some of my own here:

Keita talked about his experience with current Nginx/HHVM/MariaDB setup (slides), Toru shared insights on the “WordPress Template” feature (pre-configured Nginx + WordPress + CentOS setup) on ConoHa VIP service, and Stefan taught us about using Google PageSpeed Insights and Charles to analyze / debug site performance.
I also learned a bit about WoodWing Enterprise WordPress connector, which is a publishing system used behind recently relaunched TIME.com).

The coworking space’s owner Tanaka-san had a big surprise for Keita and myself! He had 2 ninjas deliver wedding gifts to us 🙂 We enjoyed some wine and juice thanks to them.

Group photo with ninjas

Group photo with ninjas (courtesy of Koji Tanaka)

Next meetup is scheduled on Saturday, April 12th at 11am. Please RSVP on meetup.com event page.

WordPress Meetup Tokyo, February 2014: Plugins Show and Tell

Tokyo had the heaviest snowfall in decades yesterday. Luckily it stopped snowing today, and we didn’t have to cancel WordPress Meetup Tokyo.

For the past 2 months, we have been inviting participants to speak for 5 minutes in show and tell format. Today’s topic was WordPress Plugins. I talked about Plugin Troubleshooting 101:


WordPress Plugin Troubleshooting 101 in 5 Minutes

Although all things I mentioned were super basic, understanding what to do when White Screen of Death happens is something every WordPress users should know. I hope these slides will help you or your friend getting stuck with plugin troubles!

More Links

Here are some links from other speakers’ talk.

Mizuno-san:

Brin:

Stefan:

Keita:

Next Meetup

Next WordPress Meetup Tokyo is on Sunday, March 16th. We’ll be sharing WordPress site optimization tips this time. Come join us at Co-Edo Coworking Space Kayabacho!

WordFes Nagoya 2013 Photos and Reports

The fourth WordPress conference in Nagoya, WordFes 2013 took place in Trident Computer College on Saturday, August 31st.

The organizers, WordPress community in Nagoya, is a really powerful and creative team. For the past 2 years, they’ve successfully organized WordBeach Nagoya with a daytime conference and sleepover at an adjacent lodging facility. This year, they decided to go with a summer music festival theme; set up multiple “stages”, handed out wristband, and live streamed each session.

WordFes Nagoya wapuu stickers
WordFes Nagoya wristband
My session slide
WordFes Nagoya T-shirt (limited edition!)
WordFes Nagoya Fan
Hosting panel discussion
WordPress security session
WordPress logo & fauxgo at a sports bar
WordFes Nagoya after-show

I spoke about what the core team is planning for two upcoming WordPress versions (3.7 and 3.8). I translated the whole program to give you some more ideas of Japanese WordPress event:

  • Remote Office & Cloudsourcing (Michal Mikšík)
  • WordPress Use Case Show & Tell
  • No More Copy & Paste! PHP and WP_Query for Designers (Hidekazu Ishikawa)
  • Panel Discussion: Freelancing and Working for a Company (Yasuhiro Nozue, Hitoshi Omagari, Katz Ueno, Hiroko Matsushita & Kei Nomura)
  • Hands-on: Custom Post Types, Custom Field and Custom Taxonomy (Takashi Ono)
  • Hooks Can’t Be This Easy! (Takuro Hishikawa)
  • Creating a Custom Analytics Report in 45 minutes (Seiji Morino)
  • Hosting Service Panel Discussion Returns (Masaki Takeda/Windows Azure, Ken’ichi Nishimura/CPI, Masatoshi Yokota/Sakura Internet, Kumagami Takashi/Moderator)
  • Efficient Development with WordPress (Takashi Ishihara)
  • Blog Writing with Emotional Marketing (Kiyonori Ito)
  • WordPress Security for Non-Programmers (Takayuski Miyauchi)
  • Custom Posting System with Advanced Custom Field (Saori Yamada)

You can see that people are interested in various topics. Of course many of the sessions are on tips and tricks of WordPress customization, but WordPress users in Nagoya were also enthusiastic about sessions covering security, analytics, writing, hosting, and work style.

About 50 of us went to stay at the beachside Minamihama-sou like last year. It was nice to spend some extra hours together after an event, during which a lot of things are going on and it’s hard to sit down and talk with many people. We exchanged ideas about local meetups, played with Leap Motion WordPress Plugin, discussed recent WordPress related news, and just enjoyed each other’s company.

More Photos