Doc’s WordPress News Drop is a weekly report on the most pressing WordPress news. When the news drops, I will pick it up and deliver it right to you.
In this week’s News Drop video, we talk about a few highlights from WordCamp Europe 2017 and ask why the actual attendance was 1/3 less than the estimated attendance. What are your thoughts?
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Last week was WordCamp Europe in Paris, France and it sounded fantastique. During his Q&A session with Om Malik, Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress, debuted an updated version of the Gutenberg editor. Gutenberg is a block based editor system that will one day work it’s way into WordPress core. It’s come a long way since we last covered it and now there’s a testable plugin available in the Plugin Repository. We’ll talk more about that next week.
With all of the hype around this year’s WordCamp Europe the one thing that really struck me was how far off the final attendance was from the estimates. Just a month ago, WCEU organizers were still estimating nearly 3,000 attendees for this year’s event in Paris, but the final attendance was closer to 1,900. Meaning this was one of the first years where attendance dropped from the year before.
Now, there’s no clear answer as to why the attendance was nearly 1/3 short of the estimations. In our last episode, we mentioned some ticket holders were having trouble with travel visas, but this probably only affected less that 50 attendees.
It’s a beautiful location, but France can be very expensive for tourists, so I wonder if the high cost of hotels and meals prevented many WordPressers from making the trip. If that’s the case, next year’s WordCamp Europe in Belgrade, Serbia might seem like a more affordable option.
That’s it for this week’s News Drop, be sure to stay tuned next week for our review of the new Gutenberg editor plugin and let us know why you think the attendance dropped for this year’s WordCamp Europe. Was the travel too expensive or is the WordCamp trend going down? Let us know in the comments below.
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