WordCamp Taipei 2019 concluded with huge success on 28th December 2019 at GIS NTU Convention Center in Taipei. This was the second of its kind and it received a lot of love and support from WordPressers around the world. There were many amazing speakers at WCTPE who inspired attendees to learn and grow. Leonardo Losoviz was one of the speakers and he talked about the COPE strategy and we can implement it in WordPress.
Leo is a Freelance Developer, Creator of PoP (an API + component-model + framework for building sites on PHP), a regular contributor to Smashing Magazine, and a regular WordCamp speaker.
It was an absolute delight to interview Leonardo Losoviz and we are very thankful. Thank you, Leo, for taking out time for this interview.
Here’s the full interview:
Please provide us your short introduction and also how you stumbled upon WordPress?
I’m an independent developer creating cool projects to learn new technologies (my latest one is an API combining REST and GraphQL in PHP: https://github.com/getpop/api-graphql).
Several years ago, a friend of mine asked me to help fix some problems on his website, which was WordPress. I noticed how easy it was to use, and I immediately fell in love with it.
How do you keep yourself updated with the latest news and trends in WordPress and the web overall?
I read WP Tavern, Smashing Magazine and CSS Tricks daily, and a myriad of other websites concerning PHP and its other frameworks (Laravel, Symfony).
WordPress has been a hub for many creative people throughout the years, how can a new/potential member get up to that level?
Learning WordPress is no different than learning any other tool: the more you work with it, the better you become at it.
From where can one individual draw up inspirations to increase their creativity and productivity in WordPress?
Learning everything new happening in PHP (such as PHP 7.4 and serverless PHP), mastering Object-Oriented Programming in PHP, and stepping out of WordPress for a while and using other CMSs to understand how they work and then apply the lessons to WordPress.
Were you excited about your talk at WordCamp Taipei 2019? What was the talk about?
It was about the COPE (Create Once, Publish Everywhere) strategy, a technique which allows to publish content across different platforms from a single source of truth, enabling to feed content to dissimilar platforms such as web, emails, or an iOS or Android app, while minimizing the amount of duplicated information and reducing maintenance to the minimum possible. The talk explains how to leverage Gutenberg to implement COPE in WordPress.
What can the audience take away from your presentation? How can they apply it to their WordPress journey?
They can learn how to make their WordPress sites become the single source of truth for all their online content to be distributed across several mediums (website, email, apps). As a consequence, if they need to maintain several such mediums, they can save money.
What is the real concept behind COPE strategy and how will it make things easier for webmasters?
Through Gutenberg, WordPress splits the post content into blocks which can be handled independently, making it easy to implement COPE. Webmasters will not need to maintain several versions of their content for all their applications, but a unique one, living on their WordPress site, and editable through Gutenberg, will be enough.
What are your thoughts on the Gutenberg implementation in WordPress?
Gutenberg was needed in order for WordPress to stay relevant for many years to come. Its implementation based in JS/React mirrors the current trends of the development world, so it makes sense in that the WordPress community can benefit from developments in other communities.
Which platforms do you think are in competition with WordPress and what could be the possible threats from competitors?
Static site generators and the JAMstack, since these sites are much faster than a typical WordPress site. But they are not a threat to WordPress since only developers can use them currently, while pretty much anyone can use WordPress. The threat will arise whenever the JAMstack becomes as easy to set-up and use as WordPress, but, in my opinion, this is not going to happen any time soon, if ever.
What do you think WordPress developers should do in order to remain at the top?
Step out of WordPress, learn from more modern CMSs/frameworks/technologies, then come back to WordPress and apply the lessons learned.
And lastly, any suggestions for WordPress newbies?
Learn Gutenberg, this is WordPress’ present and future. And fear not about WordPress’ future: it will further become the leading CMS (I wouldn’t be surprised if it reaches 50% of website market share), so stick to it!
DevotePress, once again, would like to thank Leonardo for this informative interview. We wish him all the very best for his future endeavors.
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