WordCamp 2023 Top Takeaways from Team Ironistic

At Ironistic, we’re committed to staying at the forefront of web development and design, especially when it comes to WordPress. We firmly believe that the digital landscape is in a constant state of change, marked by continuous improvement and evolution. Ironistic places immense importance on our team’s commitment to staying current with the latest developments, all in the pursuit of delivering the finest results to our clients.

Recently, our team had the privilege of attending the 2023 WordCamp Conference, where we delved deep into the world of WordPress and gained invaluable insights. Check out our insights as we share our team members’ takeaways.

As a company, we recognize the need to continuously enhance our knowledge of WordPress Core technologies and stay updated with the latest trends, including Gutenberg, Full Site Editing, Headless WordPress, and Accessibility. We aim to move beyond our comfort zones and explore new and improved coding methods for tasks we’ve been handling for some time! Here’s what’s on our horizon:

Regular Code Audits: To ensure our solutions are not just efficient but also accessible and high-performing, we’re conducting regular code audits. Your success depends on the quality we deliver! 

Accessibility by Design: We’re taking our accessibility standards to the next level with thorough testing, especially with various screen readers, to ensure true accessibility. We’re committed to improving accessibility on Ironstrap and are actively addressing those concerns. 

Passion-Driven Project: We understand the power of passion. We’re aligning our team members’ interests with their project assignments, fueling job satisfaction and enhancing project outcome. 

– Brandon Vreeman, Front End Developer

Our WordCamp takeaways included the continued importance of 508 compliance, with the Accessibility Checker emerging as a valuable tool. We’ve always designed with accessibility in mind, catering to all users, including those with disabilities, and these WordCamp sessions just reinforced this important usability standard.. Multisite in WordPress impressed us as an efficient way to utilize a single code base across multiple domains or subdomains, streamlining development. 

Lastly, our artificial intelligence (AI) journey urged us to exercise patience, discernment, and a clear sense of purpose. We’re training AI to serve us, with practical applications ranging from brainstorming to content planning and identifying core content pillars.

– Tracey Wells, Sr. Digital Strategist

PHP 8.1+ Compatibility Concerns: The web development community is facing issues with PHP 8.1+, primarily related to compatibility problems between themes and plugins. The community is actively working together to find effective solutions for the existing challenges and establish certification standards for future plugins and themes.

Critical Hosting Security: Ensuring hosting security involves a critical step: concealing your server’s IP address. This imperative measure can be achieved by implementing either the free version of CloudFlare or a custom Web Application Firewall (WAF), effectively mitigating potential threats. Notably, user agent bots stand out as a significant threat vector for various malicious activities. Ironistic always keeps security top of mind as part of our hosting services!

Government Website Adoption: NASA and the White House government websites have made noteworthy choices by embracing WordPress, specifically the block editor (Gutenberg), as the core of their CMS platforms. NASA’s implementation goes further, encompassing a comprehensive content posting and delivery system that will soon be open-sourced. Simultaneously, the White House website heavily relies on the block editor to provide a genuine What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) experience, simplifying the processes of page creation and posting. These instances highlight the enduring significance of the Block Editor in WordPress and underscore the importance of providing continued support.

– Josh Hall, Director of Operations

During our WordCamp experience, we collectively recognized the paramount importance of staying updated with the latest WordPress Core technologies, particularly Gutenberg and the block editor. 

Forging Powerful Integrations: We learned about fascinating integrations like linking Salesforce to Gutenberg for automatic information feeding. 

Elevating Security: We acknowledge the need to enhance our output of dynamic content to effectively sanitize HTML injections, ensuring robust protection. Your site’s security is our top priority.

WordPress’s official plugin checker emerged as a crucial resource, prompting us to assess not only our custom plugins (like our gForce plugin for Greenhouse-Wordpress integration) but also the core plugins on every site to eliminate vulnerabilities. Additionally, the power of AI for research and idea generation became evident, with the strategy of soliciting a list of 20 names for projects proving useful. Moreover, we uncovered a valuable tool on GitHub for scanning project dependencies, meticulously identifying errors and vulnerabilities. Our WordCamp insights are set to elevate our approach and deliver even greater excellence to our clients.

– David Shayne, Production Services

WordCamp provided us with fresh insights and strategies to elevate our WordPress expertise. We’re excited to implement these takeaways in our projects and continue delivering exceptional digital solutions to our clients.