WordCamp Torino 2023 site: a good example of Full Site Editing

You can do extraordinary things when you have special people by your side.

Gloria (or maybe someone else)

When Laura Sacco showed us the WordCamp Switzerland 2023 website during a meeting of WordCamp Torino Organizers, we said, “Yes, let’s do it too!”

Two elements characterize that site:

• It’s built with Full Site Editing (FSE for short)
• It presents the first rudiments of a multilingual site without using any plugins

Full Site Editing for a WordCamp site

If you’ve ever been part of organizing a WordCamp, you know that customizing the website has several hurdles to overcome, and ideas often clash with the actual options available to use on the site.

WordCamp sites are a gigantic Multisite installation. So by not having access as a Super Admin, we must move within well-defined boundaries: we can make graphical customization only through CSS editing, we don’t have the ability to install additional plugins, and we have a limited theme choice to use.

But, starting from the documentation released by the Switzerland WordCamp organization, we began to implement the site with the FSE.

It is time to confront this new feature that is taking its first steps and needs to be tested on a live, complex site to know its pros and cons.

The Site Team, especially Nicola Paroldo, got busy and built in a few days the structure and figured out how the Template Parts and related pieces worked.

A (almost) multilingual site

At the moment, a complete multilingual site is only possible through the installation of third-party plugins. Plugins that, as we said, we cannot install on a WordCamp site.

But knowing how WordPress template hierarchy, FSE, and reusable blocks work makes it possible to achieve a first honorable result.

In the past, we usually translated parts of the content into English so that non-Italian people could find the information they needed to attend WordCamp Torino. Until 2019 we did this by adding the translation to the same content page as the Italian language. Today we can instead dedicate an entire site area to translated content.

Is it perfect? No, but it’s done. As members of the WordPress community, we believe that tools should be experimented on situ. And that if we are not convinced, we can participate in improving them.

A WordCamp is also about contributing to WordPress. Building our WordCamp Torino website with Full Site Editing is part of our contribution.