Plus the latest WordPress and webtech news and events in Edmonton and around the world…
In just 14 slides, it’s my talk from the March meetup: How to Pick the Right WordPress Plugin 🔌 — or themes, extensions, and other things you can install.
This was a fun talk! I tried to pull in everything I’ve learned over the years, drawing on friendly sources in the WordPress community like Kathy Zant (“How to choose the right tech for the job“) and Remkus De Vries (“How to tell if a WordPress plugin can be trusted”).
It was really a talk about security, performance, and the WordPress community — how trust works (or fails) in open source, and how to make good decisions before you jump into others’ solutions.
I’m not surprised we got so much discussion about it over the course of an hour. Plugins are often why people get into WordPress, and the first big challenge they face.
Lessons from CloudFest 2025
Mark Szymanski has a great video recap of this year’s CloudFest:
Mark’s video is short, but Craylor‘s take on the CloudFest Hackathon is even shorter:
One of the CloudFest hackathon projects was about getting SBOMs into WordPress development. (OWASP Ottawa had a good presentation on SBOMs this month if you want to get a bit of a primer.) This is really important work for securing software development and update supply chains.
We’d like to explore having a hackathon ahead of or during WordCamp Canada this year. This would be a new thing in line with our thematic focus on students and innovation. We’ve come a long way from the old barcamps, those of us who have been working in open source and tech for several decades — and we’d like to go back.
Hit me up in WP Canada Slack if you’d like to help.
Where I get my WordPress news…
A lot of people wrote about how great this hackathon was. Rae Morey covered it for The Repository, which is the weekly “newspaper of record” in WordPress these days. Between it and the older Post Status weekly newsletter, the only other weekly WordPress newsletter I need is Remkus De Vries‘s Within WordPress.
Remkus doesn’t do “news” that much unless it has a technical subject, like the Cloudfest Hackathon and how it might be a good model for WordCamps. (That’s a thoughtful blog post others have echoed.) Whether he blogs or not, each week Remkus shares all the cool, shiny, new things he finds worthwhile, plus the best guides and advice. (The other newsletters salt this kind of thing in at the end usually.) It’s a quick but potent weekly dip in the WP ecosystem.
Remkus also has a podcast with great guests. If podcasts are your thing, there’s nothing like Do_the Woo, covering all things Woo and WordPress through a format where the insiders talk with each other. There are some terrific solo bloggers who publish when they feel like it, but among the regular weeklies, these are all I need these days.
Local Edmonton Tech Events:
- Nominations for the Edmonton Startup Community Awards are open: https://app.jotform.com/yegsca-nominationform/nominations-2025
- The Edmonton Data Science Community’s March Data Science Social is happening at Campio Brewing on April 3.
- The National Mental Health Datathon starts this weekend and runs from April 5th to 26th, 2025, bringing together data enthusiasts, mental health organizations, and nonprofit leaders to analyze real-world data and uncover insights that can drive meaningful change in mental health care across Canada. Learn more from Data for Good.
- Edmonton Startup Week is coming: October 6-10.
What’s the plan for next month?
I don’t know. What have you got? Demos? Questions? New experiences to share?
Some of us ended up at Greta for the Tech Wednesdays meetup (5:30-8:30pm) and realized if we start a little earlier for the WP Meetup, we can make it easier to attend both. What say? 😀
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