WordPress meetup in Gdynia - WordUp Trójmiasto #17

On Saturday, 8 October 2022, after a break of almost three years, the Tricity WordPress community met at the Pomeranian Science and Technology Park in Gdynia (Pomorski Park Naukowo-Technologiczny) for the seventeenth WordUp Trójmiasto.

It was a meetup for fans and users of #WordPress and #WooCommerce: eight presentations, a panel discussion and networking.

The announcement read: “We expect a knowledge-thirsty Tricity audience in these beautiful and unique natural surroundings. If you feel like a gulp of early autumn sea breeze, rubbing sand on your back, collecting seashells and talking about WordPress to the sound of seagulls along the way, book the time and sign up for the event.” (own translation from Polish)

#WordUp Trójmiasto #17 date, venue and registration

• When: 8.10.2022 (Saturday), 15:00-20:00.
• Where: Pomeranian Science and Technology Park Gdynia, Building III (CN Experyment), cinema room, al. Zwycięstwa 96/98, Gdynia.
• Admission: free, with registration required on Evenea: https://app.evenea.pl/event/wordup17/. The event page lists Mariusz Szatkowski (WordUp Trójmiasto) as the organiser.
• After the talks: conversations over drinks at PIF PAF in Gdynia.

WordUp is a WordPress community meetup format that takes place in many cities. The meetups are meant both for creators (developers) and for people who use WordPress every day as administrators, bloggers, SEO specialists or marketers.

The announcement on the community site, wpgdynia.pl, called this edition a local mini WordCamp and expected some people to come straight from Infoshare in Gdańsk.

#WordUp Trójmiasto #17 programme in Gdynia

1. Magdalena Paciorek - The block editor in a dedicated theme, a case study of cyberfolks.pl and kei.pl
2. Maciej Kuchnik - Move WordPress better, on migrating WP between servers
3. Tomasz Kołkiewicz - Canonical links and their importance for SEO
4. Tomasz Palak - How not to get too inspired?
5. Marcin Andrzejewski - The last mile in content delivery. Text readability in WordPress.
6. Marcin Krzemiński - Introduction to WP-CLI
7. Dawid Urbański - 1.7 million zloty in 45 months without a product of your own. How to earn better as a WordPress developer?
8. Maciej Palmowski - Astro + WordPress = 🚀
9. Panel discussion moderated by Kamil Kawałko, with Michał Strześniewski (300.codes), Maciek Nowak (Osom) and Max Matłoka
10. Conversations over drinks - PIF PAF, Gdynia

#WordUp Gdynia 2022 speakers and talks

The speaker and talk descriptions below follow the organisers’ announcement published on wpgdynia.pl.

#Maciek Kuchnik

One of the first speakers at the October WordUp in Gdynia was Maciek Kuchnik, WordPress developer. He created the podcast “Rób WordPressa” and wrote the book “Rób WordPressa lepiej, przenieś swoją pracę na wyższy poziom” (do WordPress better, raise the standard of your work). WordPress is his main occupation. He builds sites on it, writes themes and plugins, looks after client sites and runs training. He is an active member of the Polish WordPress community and has spoken many times at WordUps and WordCamps.

His talk: “Move WordPress better, on migrating WP between servers”.

Moving WordPress between servers is part of every WordPress developer’s job. The announcement promised simple ways to speed up and automate the process, plus his own methods for moving very large sites with minimal downtime.

#Marcin Andrzejewski

The next speaker was Marcin Andrzejewski, lecturer and consultant. Practitioner | Contributor. Marcin is a graphic designer focused on lettering-based design and visual communication. He lectures in visual communication and typography and publishes culture online. He belongs to the Polish WordPress community and organises WordUp! Kalisz. His talks and boldly stated theses tend to stir up the room.

Topic: “The last mile in content delivery. Text readability in WordPress.” The last mile is a logistics term for the specific conditions of the final delivery of a parcel by a courier to the end recipient. What can we learn from the largest courier companies in the world? Is creating and publishing content the creator’s last task? What can a developer do so that a theme sells its content better? Which mechanisms built into WordPress can we use to improve readability? The presentation answered these and several other questions. Your site becomes like a parcel locker standing in your reader’s flat, all because #TypographyMatters.

#Marcin Krzemiński

If you had not worked with WP-CLI yet, there was no better chance to get to know it.

Marcin Krzemiński, developer and freelancer, introduced the topic. He has worked in IT and web development since 2006. WordPress has been with him from the start (with a short break). He prefers front-end work, though back-end is not foreign to him. Along the way he also gained experience with e-commerce platforms such as Shopify and BigCommerce. Since 2016 he has worked mainly for clients from Australia and the USA.

Marcin introduced managing WordPress from the command line: how WP-CLI works in general, plus the basic modules and commands it offers.

#Tomasz Palak

This speaker needs no introduction.

Tomasz Palak is a legal counsel (radca prawny), speaker and author of articles on his own blog and in the press. He has been on the podium of the I Love Marketing conference seven times and has also spoken at Infoshare, TEDx and many other events. He lectures at WSB, WSAiB, WSEI and UTH. Outside organisations, among them Dzień Dobry TVN and prawo.pl, ask him for expert comment. He wrote the book “Internet a prawo - jak się nie potknąć?” (the internet and the law, how not to trip up). In private he plays the guitar.

Topic: “How not to get too inspired?” Tomasz spoke about where the legal line runs when you reference someone else’s work. It is one of the most frequent questions he gets as a lawyer “from the internet”: how far can you go? Through real stories of other people’s wins and losses he showed the audience how to deal with this difficult subject.

#Magdalena Paciorek

Magdalena Paciorek showed how she uses the block editor on the company sites cyberfolks.pl and kei.pl. She covered why a company needs the block editor at all and how she adapted the editor to the required needs. Magdalena is a long-time developer and WordPress evangelist at cyber_Folks, a Gutenberg and no-code enthusiast, and after hours an organiser of the Poznań WordPress community meetups.

#Maciej Palmowski

A talk for people who care about a fast web and simple development. Maciej Palmowski is a developer; at the time of the WordUp he worked at Buddy as WordPress Ambassador. After hours he collects news for WordPressówka or rides his bike. The talk: Astro + WordPress = 🚀. Astro was one of the newest and fastest-growing JS frameworks. The announcement promised to show what makes it special and how to connect it to WordPress.

#Tomasz Kołkiewicz

Tomasz Kołkiewicz is an SEO expert with 17 years of experience. He runs the Kraków agency SEO4.net, where he automates and optimises everything he can get his hands on. He shares knowledge on SEO, WordPress and process automation. He owns the PBNmarket.pl shop with link building services and created Flobo, an accounting robot that automates invoice handling. He likes #workation and working while walking his dog.

Topic: “Canonical links and their importance for SEO”. Canonical links are an often overlooked part of SEO strategy. According to the announcement, tests on several hundred articles with a canonical link, run across a group of more than 300 blogs, confirmed a significant effect of publishing with a canonical on the visibility of the original article. Tomasz also covered Google’s answers about the status of indexed articles with a canonical: what the indexing statistics look like, to what extent Google follows the hint in the canonical link and how that affects the visibility of the original.

#Dawid Urbański

Dawid Urbański made 1.7 million zloty in 45 months without a product of his own. This is how he described his talk:

“Making money is, for most of us, the reason we work. Usually, the more we earn, the better. Over the last 10 years of working as a web developer I kept looking for ways to increase my earnings as a WordPress developer. The result was constantly raising the bar and beating the previous year’s results. In this presentation I will tell you how I achieved it and how you can get there too. Over the last 45 months I earned one million seven hundred thousand zloty by exchanging my time and skills for money. The entire amount comes only from work done. There is no sale of any product of my own, no subscriptions or outsourcing here. Only my own hard work, which pays off.”

Dawid Urbański, announcement on wpgdynia.pl (own translation from Polish)

#Kamil Kawałko

The panel discussion was moderated by Kamil Kawałko, president of the WWW Foundation (Fundacja WWW), KKWADRAT.com. He specialises in communication, including work on user interfaces and #UX. His skills in both graphics and language let him work effectively on promotion and PR for various organisations. He has designed websites, applications and printed publications, and publishes industry reports and books. He has taught academic courses and training in technology and communication, and has delivered projects for small and large companies and for universities. The #WWW foundation promotes good practice in designing web solutions.

The panel included Michał Strześniewski (300.codes), Maciek Nowak (Osom) and Max Matłoka.

#What a WordUp is and how such a meetup is organised

In the article Jak zorganizować WordUp? (how to organise a WordUp) on wpgdynia.pl, the organisers describe WordUps as grassroots, free meetups of WordPress enthusiasts that anyone can organise. The recipe there is simple: speakers first (two or three people is a good start), then a date and a venue with a projector and screen. Attendance varies from a dozen or so to 50 people. Someone should host the meetup, welcome the audience, introduce the speakers and moderate the discussion. Local hosting companies are typical sponsors, and after a WordUp people traditionally meet over a beer to talk about WordPress. That explains item 10 on the #17 programme.

The WordPress meetup organiser handbook on make.wordpress.org defines meetups like this:

“Meetups are locally-organized groups that meet for events on a regular basis (commonly once a month) and power year-round WordPress communities. They are a vital part of the overall WordPress open source project.”

Meetup Organizer Handbook

The Tricity WordUp does not follow a monthly rhythm. According to the wpgdynia.pl archive, its busiest years had a few editions each.

#WordUp Trójmiasto history, editions from 2012 to 2026

The wpgdynia.pl archive lets you trace the sequence of editions. The dates below are the dates of the posts on the site, not always the dates of the meetups.

Edition #15 took place on 15 June 2019 in the same park, in Building III (room D, first floor), with networking afterwards at the Tam Gdzie Zawsze pub. Edition #16 was announced for 28 March 2020, also at PPNT, and its lineup shared several names with #17: Magdalena Paciorek, Maciej Palmowski (Gutenberg blocks with ACF Blocks), Marcin Krzemiński (introduction to WP-CLI), Marcin Andrzejewski (alchemy, maths and typography in WordPress) and Michał Strześniewski (case study of a Gutenberg project). The archive holds no report from edition #16, and the #17 announcement speaks of a break of almost three years.

#Which WordUp #17 speakers returned for WordUp #18

The organisers announced the next meetup on wpgdynia.pl, WordUp Trójmiasto #18, for 22 April 2023 at 12:00 in the Gdynia City Museum (Muzeum Miasta Gdyni) at ul. Zawiszy Czarnego 1, with networking at Browar Port Gdynia and a celebration of 20 years of WordPress. The announcement aimed the event at agency staff, PR and marketing teams, bloggers, developers and freelancers. The programme listed 12 speakers, and five of the eight #17 speakers returned with new topics:

• Marcin Krzemiński: automated deployment with GitLab CI (after the WP-CLI introduction at #17),
• Magda Paciorek: a repeater in the block editor without ACF,
• Maciej Kuchnik: custom post types, custom taxonomies and custom fields as the “WordPress power trio”,
• Dawid Urbański: what it takes to become a WordPress developer,
• Tomasz Palak: legal aspects of AI in WordPress, ChatGPT and Midjourney,
• Kamil Kawałko: moderating the panel discussion again.

A later edition: WordUp Trójmiasto #19.

#WordCamp Gdynia and the Science and Technology Park

PPNT has also hosted a WordCamp. According to the WordCamp Gdynia 2016 site, the conference took place on 10-11 September 2016 at the Pomeranian Science and Technology Park, with a Contributor Day planned for 9 September. The organisers described the park as one of the largest science and technology parks in Poland, located in Gdynia’s city centre. The theme of that edition was #creativity, with a nod to the WordPress motto “Code is poetry” and to the creative people who use WordPress every day: photographers, graphic designers, bloggers and writers. The invitation addressed WordPress enthusiasts, PHP, JavaScript and front-end developers, bloggers, interface designers, SEO specialists, hosting providers and specialists in internet law and e-marketing. That list is very close to the WordUp announcement: developers, administrators, bloggers, SEO specialists and marketers.

The list of WordCamp Gdynia editions on central.wordcamp.org also includes the edition of 4-6 October 2024 at the National Marine Fisheries Research Institute, ul. Kołłątaja 1. Our report: WordCamp Gdynia 2024.

#WordUp Gdynia 2022 video recording

YouTube has a recording titled “Gdynia WordPress Meetup - WordUp #17” from the iam.nomad.travel channel (Rafał Osiński), also embedded on the event page on wpgdynia.pl: watch the WordUp #17 recording.