Speakers: Felix Arntz

  • Tackling performance in the WordPress ecosystem at scale

    WordCamp US 2022Speaker: Felix Arntz

    December 18, 2022 — This talks suggests best practices and approaches to performance at scale in the WordPress ecosystem.

  • Felix Arntz: Enhancing performance in an open-source CMS ecosystem

    WordCamp Europe 2022Speaker: Felix Arntz

    July 14, 2022 — While WordPress is still the CMS with the largest market share by far, certain proprietary CMSs have been heavily catching up in the past few years.

    Despite a much more limited feature set, they are gaining popularity, and much of that can be attributed to better user experience and performance.

    Admittedly, proprietary CMSs hosted in a controlled environment and maintained by a single company have a much easier job improving performance, compared to an open-source CMS with a massive third-party ecosystem with over 60,000 plugins and themes like WordPress.

    But exploring ways to enhance performance in WordPress at scale is crucial for long-term success and, with over 40% market share, should even be a responsibility towards the open web.

    In late 2021, the official WordPress performance team was formed, to tackle monitoring, enhancing, and promoting performance in the WordPress ecosystem.

    This session will take a closer look at the origin of the team, its focus areas and initial priorities, the goals achieved so far, the roadmap for the future, and how you can help.

  • Felix Arntz: Accessing APIs using OAuth on the Federated (WordPress) Web

    WordCamp Europe 2021Speaker: Felix Arntz

    June 28, 2021 — Over the past years, APIs have grown to be the engine of the web, with OAuth 2.0 being the standard for enabling secure cross-platform connections to such APIs on behalf of a user. However, setting up OAuth requires extensive technical knowledge of the protocol and the platform. For a distributed ecosystem such as WordPress these are hurdles almost impossible to overcome.

    This talk explains how we solved this problem for the Site Kit plugin and various Google APIs. It explores alternate approaches to enable a secure, seamless, and scalable connection between a WordPress site and third-party services to access user data in a way that can be leveraged by other plugins and services as well.

  • Felix Arntz: Types, Subtypes, Meta, Options: An Abstract View on Data Structures in WordPress

    WordCamp Portland 2018Speaker: Felix Arntz

    January 14, 2020 — When we work with WordPress, we deal with data that we commonly know as posts, pages, media, comments, options etc. However, the REST API has required us to rethink what some of these data structures are and how they should work, particularly in regards to metadata and options, which have historically been an undefined dump of arbitrary data. This session provides an abstract overview of how data in WordPress is structured and gives insight on questions like: How are post types and taxonomies related? What makes metadata different from options? Where does my own data fit in? If you are developing for WordPress, it is crucial to know some of these concepts. In recent years, WordPress has started to make some structure out of its previous data mess, but is still only touching the surface. And we can all contribute to figuring it out together.

    Presentation Slides »

  • Felix Arntz: Building an AMP compatible WordPress site

    WordCamp para desarrolladores Sevilla 2019Speaker: Felix Arntz

    October 18, 2019 — AMP is an open-source web components framework that enables building websites that are compelling, smooth and performant and can be built in an easy and declarative way. With AMP, even highly dynamic and interactive web pages load near instantaneously. The framework furthermore ensures that the high-quality experience achieved after the initial build of a website is maintained over time, by utilizing its powerful validation framework which immediately highlights issues that could potentially hurt user experience.

    The core of this workshop is to build a WordPress site that benefits from the power of the AMP framework, taking into consideration all the different pieces a typical site consists of. We will go through the process of creating an AMP compatible theme, and learn what to look out for when selecting or building AMP compatible plugins to enhance the feature set of your site. In preparation for this, a brief introduction will highlight the key principles of AMP, explain why it exists, and showcase some impressive use-cases of the framework.

    Presentation Slides »

  • Felix Arntz: Leveraging the Power of Custom Elements in Gutenberg

    WordCamp Europe 2019Speaker: Felix Arntz

    September 12, 2019 — If you have worked with JavaScript over the years, chances are you used a mechanism to define reusable components that are rendered and can be interacted with in an encapsulated manner, for example in React or Vue. Web Components is a set of features that introduces similar mechanisms natively to the browser. Having a standard layer for these so-called leaf components aids interoperability. Imagine a future where you can reuse a leaf component you wrote for a simple native JS application in a React application or vice versa. Felix will teach you how to leverage Web Components by example, such as usage by the AMP framework or within Gutenberg blocks.

    Presentation Slides »

  • Panel: Growing beyond Gutenberg. From block-based editing to site administration

    WordCamp Europe 2019Speakers: Felix Arntz, Kåre Steffensen, Mark Uraine, Elio Rivero, Tom J Nowell

    September 5, 2019 — WordPress success is the success of our community, and currently, WordPress is going beyond its own barriers and limits. The Gutenberg project is transforming WordPress into an even more powerful editing tool that will change our idea of modern day web editors.

    Whether you are familiar Gutenberg or not, this discussion panel moderated by Hannah Smith will let you know the different phases of the project and you’ll find out first hand from the experts the latest Gutenberg news and updates. Join us to find out more!

    Hosted by Hannah Smith

    Panellists:
    – Elio Rivero
    – Mark Uraine
    – Kåre Steffensen
    – Felix Arntz
    – Tom Nowell

    Presentation Slides »

  • Felix Arntz: Web Policies and Reporting – Defining Contracts Between Your Site and the Browser

    WordCamp Nordic 2019Speaker: Felix Arntz

    June 10, 2019 — A diverse environment like your WordPress site is inherently difficult to control. If you are a developer, you can make sure your own code meets quality standards and honors best practices, but it is usually not possible to do the same for plugins created by others. It becomes even more of a problem if you are required to rely on third-party code entirely, for example when you maintain a WordPress site, but don’t write extensions for it yourself.

    Recently, new browser technologies have been introduced to help tackle such issues. Content Security Policies and Feature Policies allow you to define contracts between your site and the browser, efficiently enforcing your site to stick to certain best practices you define. You don’t want your site to ever serve images that are too large? You don’t want your site to ever give the user that pop-up for browser notifications? These new policies put you in control over how your site interacts with the user, relying on the browser as a middle man. If there is a violation of the policies you have defined, the browser can inform you via a new Reporting API standard, allowing you to spot the problem and act upon it. This session will provide an introduction to these new technologies, and then dive into how you can use them in WordPress.

    Presentation Slides »

  • Felix Arntz: How To Sustain Long-Term Contributions to WordPress Core

    WordCamp London 2018Speaker: Felix Arntz

    January 18, 2019 — This talk is for you – even if you haven’t attended a contributor day before. The session will highlight benefits of contributing, provide recommendations on how to find your spot and build trust, and give insights on which traits are particularly valuable to have or pick up. You will furthermore learn how contributing to core is by far not only about writing code. The goal of this session is to prepare you for a beneficial long-term relationship as a core contributor so that you can make a significant impact over time.