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Working on WordPress at the CloudFest Hackathon 2022

Around 100 experts from the hosting and cloud industry got together at Europa-Park in Rust, Germany from March 19–21 to collaborate on eight exciting projects, among them — WordPress.

Karlsruhe, March 24, 2022

After being canceled in 2020 and 2021, the CloudFest Hackathon was finally on again. Around 100 experts from the hosting and cloud industry got together at Europa-Park in Rust, Germany from March 19–21 to collaborate on eight exciting projects, among them — WordPress. As well as being on the jury and an event sponsor, IONOS sent two project leads to participate.

Simon Kraft presenting the Antispam Bee project

Improving WordPress spam protection

Simon Kraft, WordPress Product Owner (IONOS), led a project entitled “Local WordPress Spam Protection with Antispam Bee”. Its mission was to take the comment spam detection and blocking plugin to the next level.

Over two exciting days, the project team restructured the plugin, which has grown over the past decade. With a new modular structure, Antispam Bee will be open to third-party plugins and content in the future, making its effective spam filters available for contact forms and login pages. The team was able to finish an initial pre-release version during the hackathon. This version is now going through an extensive testing process, but an official release is already in the pipeline. Download the project presentation.

Making the IndieWeb more user-friendly

Matthias Pfefferle sharing the results of the WordPress and the Indieweb project

The IndieWeb is a community of individual, personal websites connected by shared standards and principles. Webmention — a decentralized system for distributing comments and reactions and linking to social media content — is a central building block of the IndieWeb.

The WordPress and the IndieWeb project team led by Matthias Pfefferle, Head of WordPress Development, set out to make access to the Webmention plugin straightforward by removing barriers to entry for users without coding skills. To achieve this, the settings page was optimized to give users a more hands-on and intuitive way of navigating through their settings. In addition, the feature to link another user has been revamped and contextualized, for instance, in a reply, like, repost, or bookmark. The next step is to integrate Webmention into the WordPress core. Download the project presentation.

And the winner is…

Hackathon project leads with their prizes

A collaborative Joomla! project took the top overall spot and also won for Best Social Media Engagement, thanks to massive support from the Joomla! community. Best Presentation went to Aleksandar Savkovic’s “Securing WordPress with the WP-CLI”. “Building a performance testing environment for WordPress core”’ took home the prize for Most Efficient Team. Some of the prizes awarded included t-shirts, theme park tickets, and Lego sets sponsored by IONOS.

CloudFest Hackathon 2022 impressions: