Topic: Sisu Talk

Session

KISS: keeping it simple in a complex world

In a world of ever increasing complexity and AI solutions we can easily get lost on what the end goal is that we are trying to achieve. Every choice we make comes with a cost: from fast solutions to fix an issue quickly to hasty decisions that might not envision the whole scope of a project.

Managing expectations and keeping things real is vital to creating projects that achieve their goals and ultimately lead not only to customer satisfaction, but the end user’s success. After all, the user’s success is the customer’s success, and the customer’s success is the developer and company’s success.

In this forum Matias celebrates simplicity and how that translates into better habits, developer practices, satisfaction and success to clients, users and colleagues.

Session

Geographically Distributed MySQL Clusters for WordPress

WordPress sites are characteristically read-heavy. Content updates occur far less frequently than page and plugin loads, which cause sometimes heavy database traffic. Traditional database deployments therefore create latency for global audiences, limit horizontal read scaling, and introduce single points of failure that complicate disaster recovery.

The session includes a brief introduction to database clustering concepts and the current options available in the market. It covers traditional approaches such as building and managing your own MySQL cluster on virtual machines, as well as managed cloud database services from major hyperscalers, highlighting the trade-offs in control, operational overhead, vendor lock-in, geographic distribution, and disaster recovery.

This session presents a practical architecture for a multi-region MySQL cluster built on a Bring-Your-Own-Cloud (BYOC) DBaaS platform. The design deploys database nodes in separate geographic regions (for example, one in Europe, one in North America, and one in Asia-Pacific) while retaining full operational control over the underlying cloud accounts—public or private—without vendor lock-in to any single hyperscaler.

The approach directly benefits WordPress site owners and users by reducing page-load latency for global visitors, improving Core Web Vitals and SEO, providing continuous availability during regional outages, and enabling cost-effective horizontal scaling without rewriting application code.

Session

Future scenarios for the Web

In last year’s WP Suomi talk I was looking at the Web’s past and present, and a bit to the future. This year the viewpoint is to the future only.

I’ll present a few future scenarios for the Web and web services, like The Repository and The Receipt, not just one future. It would be fun also to engage the audience and have them vote and discuss which scenarios would seem possible and most enticing.

Session

Going ACF-free: replacing a plugin dependency with core WordPress

Advanced Custom Fields has been a default in WordPress work for over a decade, to the point where a lot of sites cannot be maintained without it. Core has caught up considerably since then, particularly in how native Gutenberg blocks handle custom data and how blocks can be registered. Rolle goes through what core offers in place of the features developers lean on most, what changes in how you build once the plugin is gone, and where ACF is still the more sensible choice.