WordCamp Europe was held this weekend in Paris, bringing together 1,900 attendees from 79 countries. Another 1,000 people joined via livestream from 77 countries to make a total audience of 2,900 participants from 92 countries. The number of attendees on the ground was about one third less than original estimates of 3,000, but everyone who wanted a ticket was able to get one. A team of 221 volunteers communicated on Slack behind the scenes to make the event run as smoothly as possible.

Many of you may not know this but Kinsta is proud to call itself a bootstrapped company. This means we have never taken outside funds from venture capitalists or outside investors, unlike some of our competitors. We appreciate what VCs have to offer, and there are without a doubt, many world-class solutions and startups today that wouldn’t exist without their help. But there are also pros and cons to going down this route. So today we want to dive into eight benefits of not being a VC-funded company, and how you can still create a successful and profitable business.

Belgrade, Serbia will host the sixth edition of WordCamp Europe, June 14-16, 2018. Prior host cities include Leiden, Sofia, Seville, Vienna, and Paris. Attendees and the massive 221-person volunteer crew gave their enthusiastic approval when organizers announced the event would be returning to Eastern Europe next year.

There are plenty of plugins out there designed to make BuddyPress work even harder for you, and many make it easier for you to manage your BuddyPress social network and for your users to interact with it. In this post, we're going to identify some of those plugins. These are our favorite BuddyPress plugins that add extra features to it or boost its power or ease of use.

In this post, we round up 10 cool and useful (oh, and free!) WordPress plugins available on the WordPress Plugin Directory. This month’s WordPress Plugin Roundup includes everything from a way to add a reading progress bar to a page to tools for customizing the WordPress admin dashboard.

The WordPress directory is full of literally thousands of free themes and plugins and can change the design and functionality of your site in seconds. In addition to that, we have masses of premium plugins and other commercial offerings from high-quality WordPress companies. As a consequence, anyone looking to enhance their site is just a Google query away from doing so. Enter “free WordPress themes” and you are sure to find something for your purpose. However, there’s a catch. Because WordPress is as open as it is, anyone can put up free themes on their site. However, you won’t always know what’s in them. If they contain something that you don’t like, by installing a theme on your site, you can seriously harm it.

As we’ve mentioned before here, the WordPress core team is debating which JavaScript framework to add to the existing set of frameworks. React and Vue.js appear to be front-runners, with many members of the community discussing the pros and cons of these two frameworks. So which framework rocks and which framework is the new prototype.js.? Let’s find out.

Security is a very important topic. To secure WordPress, you must have responsible users making use of an instance of WordPress that is only executing secure code (maybe helped by some extra “hardening”) on a secured server. But a compromise of any part of that can invalidate on all your work on any other part. There is no single solution to having a secure WordPress site. What we’re going to focus on in this article is what you, as a developer, should be thinking about when writing PHP for WordPress if you want to avoid the obvious errors and security blunders.