Last year, the WordCamp Europe team worked to add PWA features to WordCamp.org. It was used on the WCEU 2019 site, and was available “in beta” for anyone who asked to try it out. As of now, these features are available for everyone 🎉
Thanks to everyone involved in planning, building & testing this: @mburridge, @ziontrooper, @avillegasn, @Iceable, @tfrommen, @macloune, @marcusjwilson, @vdwijngaert, @westonruter, @hlashbrooke, @iandunn, @tjnowell, @jb510, @coreymckrill, @andreamiddleton, @sippis, @melchoyce, @karmatosed, @garyj, @webcommsat, @marks99, and everyone at WordCamps Europe, Dublin, US & Stuttgart.
For history, all posts from the PWA project.
Remind me, what is a “Progressive Web App” (PWA)?
A Progressive Web App is a set of tools that are used to make websites more “app-like”. For sites on WordCamp.org, this is a way to make your site more low-bandwidth friendly with no effort on your part 🙂
These features are:
- More browser caching for assets like JS, CSS, and images. New pages will load these assets from the cache first, making subsequent page loads faster.
- Pages are also cached, so going back and forth between visited pages will seem near-instant.
- The cached pages & assets are available offline, so if someone visits your schedule page, then turns off their wifi, they’ll still be able to load the schedule.
- While offline, if they visit a page they haven’t visited before, it’s not cached, but we can show them a custom page — so all new sites now have a draft page called “Offline”.
- During the event, site visitors will have the option to “install” your site as an app, all this does is create an icon on their home screen – it does not change the functionality or layout of your site.
How can I use this?
If you’re an organizer, you’ll need to turn it on. This isn’t active for everyone by default. If you want this on your site, you’ll need to do two things:
- Edit & publish the Offline page, you’ll find this drafted in your pages
- Activate the PWA plugin.
If you’re an attendee, you only need to visit the site before going offline. If the WordCamp you’re attending has turned on these features, your browser will automatically use them. You’ll see faster page loads and still get information even without an internet connection.