Last year, the WordCamp 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 team worked to add PWA features to WordCamp.org. It was used on the WCEU WordCamp Europe. The European flagship WordCamp event. 2019 site, and was available “in beta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process.” for anyone who asked to try it out. As of now, these features are available for everyone 🎉
Thanks to everyone involved in planning, building & testing this: @mburridge, @ziontrooper, @avillegasn, @Iceable, @tfrommen, @macloune, @marcusjwilson, @vdwijngaert, @westonruter, @hlashbrooke, @iandunn, @tjnowell, @jb510, @coreymckrill, @andreamiddleton, @sippis, @melchoyce, @karmatosed, @garyj, @webcommsat, @marks99, and everyone at WordCamps Europe, Dublin, US & Stuttgart.
For history, all posts from the PWA project.
Remind me, what is a “Progressive Web App” (PWA)?
A Progressive Web App is a set of tools that are used to make websites more “app-like”. For sites on WordCamp.org, this is a way to make your site more low-bandwidth friendly with no effort on your part 🙂
These features are:
- More browser caching for assets like JS, CSS CSS is an acronym for cascading style sheets. This is what controls the design or look and feel of a site., and images. New pages will load these assets from the cache first, making subsequent page loads faster.
- Pages are also cached, so going back and forth between visited pages will seem near-instant.
- The cached pages & assets are available offline, so if someone visits your schedule page, then turns off their wifi, they’ll still be able to load the schedule.
- While offline, if they visit a page they haven’t visited before, it’s not cached, but we can show them a custom page — so all new sites now have a draft page called “Offline”.
- During the event, site visitors will have the option to “install” your site as an app, all this does is create an icon on their home screen – it does not change the functionality or layout of your site.
How can I use this?
If you’re an organizer, you’ll need to turn it on. This isn’t active for everyone by default. If you want this on your site, you’ll need to do two things:
- Edit & publish the Offline page, you’ll find this drafted in your pages
- Activate the PWA plugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party.
If you’re an attendee, you only need to visit the site before going offline. If the WordCamp you’re attending has turned on these features, your browser will automatically use them. You’ll see faster page loads and still get information even without an internet connection.
#pwa
