WordCamp PWA : An update

This is an update about plans to enhance the WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Europe website as a Progressive Web App for the 2019 Camp. Plans were first announced in this post in February 2019:
https://make.wordpress.org/community/2019/02/13/wordcamp-pwa-plugin-proposal-and-designs/

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The organising teams from WordCamp Europe 2019 have been working on plans to enhance WordCamp websites by adopting Progressive Web App (PWA) features.

The plan is to provide contextual information for attendees that is served from and integrated with the main WordCamp website, and which can be stored locally on the user’s devices for offline access. This would allow attendees to access key event information in a more immediate and flexible way.

Initially, we had conceptualised this as an additional “layer” of content, which would load “over the top” of the existing Camp website for the duration of the event.

After sharing these original plans, we received a lot of feedback and suggestions from the community. Thank you!

There was much support for adding these progressive enhancements and contextual information for attendees. However, community members felt that progressive enhancements should be made to the existing site website and web pages themselves, rather than creating a separate and additional layer of content.

Based on your feedback, we now intend to take a more integrated approach to this project.

In practical terms, we will build on the great work of Weston Ruter and his Progressive Web App feature pluginFeature Plugin A plugin that was created with the intention of eventually being proposed for inclusion in WordPress Core. See Features as Plugins., which brings PWA capabilities – including service workers and the web app manifest – to WordPress. Rather than create a new and separate “layer” of context based information over the WordCamp website, we will instead enhance key pages of the existing WordCamp site – for instance, the Schedule and Speakers pages – to be stored locally on a user’s device for offline access.

In addition, we intend to create a new website homepage for the duration of the WordCamp event to display context based content on the Sessions that are “on now” and “up next”, alongside the latest Posts from the Camp website, to put this key information at the fingertips of attendees.

WordCamp Alerts & Announcements

There was initially some discussion of creating an alerts feed for important announcements at the Camp itself. During the feedback phase, a number of people felt this was unnecessary, overly complicated and could prove a barrier to wider adoption of the PWA functionality by other WordCamps.

As a result, a decision has been made to use the existing Posts functionality from the WordPress installation for the news and alerts feed during the Camp.

Visuals

Below are some visuals of how the home page of the website might appear during the Camp itself. Whilst these designs here are specific to WCEUWCEU WordCamp Europe. The European flagship WordCamp event. 2019, the content would of course take on basic styles – fonts and colours – from its WordCamp site.

We intend to complete this work in time for WCEU 2019. Beyond that, we hope that this enhancement to WordCamp websites would be available to WordCamps around the globe.

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