About WordCamp Karachi
WordCamp Karachi is the first WordCamp held in Pakistan on August 4th, 2018. It was a full day event where speakers gave their sessions on technical and business topics. WordPressiors across Pakistan wants WordCamp from a long time ago. There was a WC planned back in Lahore in 2016 but due to some issues, it was canceled. WordPress community in Karachi specially Usman Khalid and his team did a great work to bring WordCamp in Pakistan. People across Pakistan came to attend the event while Karachi is a corner of the whole country. Some of the guys specially came from other countries especially Ulrich. The number of attendees was more than 350 from 4 countries and 12 cities.
For all the speakers and sponsors there was a Cruise dinner in Marina Club by the WordCamp Karachi organizers. It was a lot of fun, and everyone enjoyed it. The best thing about the event was the networking. Ulrich was from Switzerland, and everyone thought that he could speak English only, but when he started speaking Urdu fluently, everyone was shocked.
Sessions
The next session was by Bilal Shahid on “Pairing Messenger Marketing with WooCommerce to Increase Sales”. It was quite helpful for guys who are working in eCommerce fields where they can increase their sales just by integration of any messenger, unlike a contact form. “SEO Hacks for WordPress Users” was a short talk by Fahad Rafiq in which he talked about SEO Hacks for WP based websites which were quite helpful too.
After these sessions, there was a panel by Fahad Shakeel and Muhammad Adnan on “Building Brands in WordPress” and hosted by Usman Khalid. Usman asked very helpful questions and the answers were quite satisfying by the panel members by their experiences especially by Muhammad Adnan as he has some great products like Analytify and LoginPress. Attendees asked questions too and they also got satisfying replies.
On 10:30 AM Tea break was started. In the tea break, attendees did networking with other attendees and the speakers. They discussed their products, experiences, issues and shared the contacts which will be undoubtedly helpful for them. In the Happiness Bar, there were some stalls from the sponsors which includes Jetpack/WooCommerce, Analytify and Happy Cloud in Happiness Bar. On these stalls, there were some great swags too which includes t-shirts, badges, etc.
After the Tea break, the session was by Mashhoood Rastgar on “PWAs: Mobile for the next billion users”. He explains really well about the issues in web apps for mobiles with some great examples like Facebook Lite app for Android. He gave all the necessary statistics about the traffic coming on a web and issues they faced and explained the solution too.
Next talk was by Mobeen Abdullah on “Theme development with Sage 9, DRY Templates and Laravel’s Blade Engine”. It was a quite advanced topic as a lot of audiences were either beginners to WordPress or not that much involved in theme development, but the advance theme developers have taken the interest. It was new for them that Blade as a template engine can be used in WordPress, DRY is used in Sage and a lot more things, and that’s why they later asked him questions about his session.
Before the Lunch break, the last topic was “Managing WordPress from the command line” by Ulrich. He explained the benefits of using Command Line for speed up the WordPress development as compared to GUI. He gave a couple of demos too. In between his session he asked a question “Kis
Lunch Break
In the lunch break, networking was started again. Beginners asked questions from seniors. Attendees asked questions from Speakers who gave their sessions. There was great market professionals too who were not in the speakers but they guided newbies and junior developers too. In lunch break, some of the attendees offered Zuhr prayer too.
P.S: The lunch was very tasty though.
After Break
Choosing WordPress as a Career was the panel by Faiza Yousuf, Anum Kamran, Muhammad Kashif, and Sajid Javed. Saad Hamid as a host asked a couple of good questions, and later he told attendees to ask the questions. Attendees asked good questions which were significantly answered by the panel team which is undoubtedly helpful for starting careers in WordPress for them.
Shakir Ali gave a very good session on “WordPress Security Best Practices” after the panel. Some of the tips were very helpful and new for even the advanced WP users. He showed some stats as well as a demo video too.
Keynote
There was a Keynote by Jehan Ara after Shakir’s session. Keynote talk by Jehan Ara was full of the motivations and she explained what she and people around her did for I.T industry of Pakistan, she revealed that she is writing on her blog too which is WP based. She later gave the awards to the WC KHI organizers and volunteers. Award names were quite funny like WP THOR, WP Superman, WP Iron-Man etc.
After Keynote
Haroon Q. Raja aka WP Iron Man gave the next talk, and the topic was Need for Speed – The What, Why & How of WordPress Performance Optimization. His speech was in a very professional way. During the session, he asked some funny questions relevant to talk too. He showed some stats about the performance of the sites, and the reasons caused the issues in the speed of a website.
The last talk was by Abdullah Ramzan on Gutenberg & Custom Block Development. It was another great advance session after the session by Mobeen Abdullah. Abdullah Ramzan shared some helpful tips for building custom blocks for Gutenberg. He showed an example block too which he developed for the audiences.
After Party
After last session there was a pictures taking session with Speakers and the attendees. In all the sessions there were some questions rounds and the correct answer leads to win the chocolates. Event was finished at 06:00 PM. There was After Party for all the attendees with some great music, B.B.Q, cold drinks and ice creams. This after party was the major networking opportunity for the attendees as well as the speakers. It was quite long and run for hours. People got to know more each other, taken more pictures and gain a lot of worthy information, ideas, motivation and energy.
Next WordCamp in Pakistan is WordCamp Islamabad and we’re already excited for it.
