InMotion Hosting Goes To WordCamp US 2022

WordCamp US 2022 (WCUS), returned to an in-person conference after a two-year break due to COVID-19. Hosted in San Diego, California, WordPress enthusiasts around the country were excited to return and connect over all subjects related to WordPress.

Our Support for WordCamp US in the Past

InMotion Hosting was a Bronze Sponsor for WordCamp Miami 2020. Little did we know that it would be the last conference hosted in person indefinitely.

While WCUS 2021 was a virtual conference, we continued to show our support for the WordPress community by sponsoring the event as a Redwoods Sponsor.

We believe passionately in the power of the open source community, so InMotion Hosting has committed our team members’ time to support WordPress.org initiatives and donated to the WordPress Foundation.

This year, we returned to WordCamp US as a Silver Sponsor, offering Travel and Diversity Speaker Scholarships to provide users the ability to travel to San Diego and further their knowledge of WordPress.

WordCamp US 2022 San Diego

WordCamp US 2022 took place at the Town & Country Resort hotel in San Diego California. A colorful, historic, mid-century modern hotel with beautiful indoor and outdoor event spaces.

The InMotion Hosting Team was thrilled to attend and meet with other enthusiasts from the WordPress community. The team flew west from our headquarters in Virginia to showcase our current and future WordPress projects.

WordCamp US 2022 had a fantastic range of diverse speakers and sessions, from best design practices for your WordPress websites to designing for accessibility, creating custom blocks, and more.

This year had the added advantage of all sessions being live-streamed directly from the WordCamp US website, free of charge, allowing users all around the globe to access the conference sessions. All sessions currently remain available on their website. 

InMotion Hosting had a spot in the Sponsor hall as a Silver sponsor where the team had the opportunity to share and further discuss our WordPress projects.

Todd Robinson, Harry Jackson, and Alexandra Stoermann represented InMotion Hosting at the conference and met WordPress enthusiasts and partners from around the country.

The team met up with Virtuozzo to discuss the ways the company is contributing to the future of WordPress, as well as their growing technology.

The team also had the pleasure of sitting down with Till Kruss, a senior full-stack developer, creator of Relay and Object Cache Pro, and a member of the WordPress Performance Team to discuss WordPress performance and how it will change in the months and years to come.

InMotion Hosting’s Travel Scholarship winner, Ana Vela, is a front-end web developer from New Mexico, who is focused on web accessibility and inclusive design. We were thrilled to meet her in person at WordCamp San Diego!

The team also met up with other companies including 10Up, Convesio, Seahawk Media, and Automattic, to further discuss how WordPress is changing as a service to users, and what improvements can be made to further support its growth.

Managed WordPress Hosting

At the event, we were proud to reveal InMotion Central and the Next Generation of Managed WordPress Hosting. Central is an all-in-one platform that makes it easy to build, test, deploy and optimize WordPress sites from a single dashboard.

Other InMotion Central features include:

• WordPress Optimized Hosting – Purpose-built WordPress hosting optimized with UltraStack to give your site better performance and increased reliability. 
• Playground Environments – Spin up testing environments to try out new plugins, themes, or debug code without affecting your live site. 
• WordPress Snaps – Shorten website production timelines by building sites from Snaps. A Snap is a reusable blueprint of your favorite theme and plugin combinations.
• Team Collaboration – Invite team members to collaborate on website development projects. You can invite users and clients and manage their admin permissions.

A lot more information is to come about InMotion Central, and we cannot wait to share it with you!

Join our waiting list for future InMotion Central updates and news.

A Q&A with Matt Mullenweg

Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress, hosted a Q&A discussing current WordPress concerns and future integrations.

When asked about his thoughts on what could be improved on WordPress, Mullenweg responded:

“I have been thinking a lot about projects that are really built for the long term […] One I have been enamored with is SQLite. They think of data formats being accessible for decades to come […] a really safe data storage format for rich data. I think [SQLite] would pair well with WordPress’ thoughts on longevity.” 

He also added that he would like to find a better way to get people involved and start in the WordPress community, mentioning that because of the pandemic there was a stall in community meetups and showed excitement for the WordCamp US 2022 Contributor Day held on the last day of the conference.

“I think the best way to get involved with the WordPress community is typically sitting down at a laptop with somebody who is involved and walking through it and learning together […] I would love to get better at doing that in a distributed fashion.”

When asked about what he was looking forward to the most on Contributor Day Mullenweg expressed that there are a lot of simple changes that could greatly improve the WordPress Core and WordPress.org website, as well as expand multilingual capabilities.  

Mullenweg further reiterated that the future of WordPress is with Gutenberg, rather than the Classic Editor a lot of users grew fond of, after being asked if there was a way to put a toggle between the two versions.

“The preponderance of new development in WordPress is really focused on the block editor, so any effort towards editing the toggle we would rather make it so you don’t want the toggle anymore […] and someday [the Classic Editor plugin] won’t be the first plugin you install.”

Other questions included his thoughts on how the Metaverse and Web3 might not affect the way we interact with websites, furthering multilingual capabilities, and how to continue working on making web design more user-friendly for first-time designers.

You can watch the full one-hour session on WordPress’ YouTube Channel as well as the live streaming videos on the WordCamp US website.

WordCamp US 2023 National Harbor

Shortly after WordCamp US 2022 came to an end, it was announced that WordCamp US 2023 will take place on August 23-25 in National Harbor, Maryland. 

The blog post on the official WordCamp US website marked its focus for next year’s WordCamp as learning and creation:

Our current vision of WordCamp US 2023 focuses on learning and creation. After all, one of the WordPress community’s greatest strengths is learning from each other and creating together.

At InMotion Hosting, we are thrilled to see what the next year will bring for WordPress and its growth, and we will continue to collaborate and support its path forward as an open source community. 

If you would like to see more photos of WordCamp US 2022, their official account created a Google Photos folder, accessible to the public, with photos of WCUS 2022 speakers, events, and all things San Diego. 

See you at WordCamp US next year!

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