A Game-Changer for
Open-Source Tech!
April 7, 2023, by Carole Olinger, Head of CloudFest Hackathon
Close to 120 hackers from all over the world gathered at Europa-Park Rust, Europe’s biggest amusement park, for the CloudFest Hackathon 2023. Working on innovative and game-changing solutions to open-source tech challenges, this year’s event attracted the largest attendance yet, increasing last year’s ‘Greatest Hackathon Ever’ by almost 50%!
In a collaborative and dynamic environment, software engineers, developers, and web professionals had the unique opportunity to demonstrate their talents and develop new skills. The vibes were fantastic, as seen on social media hashtags #CFHack and #CFHack2023.
Let’s dive into the highlights of this year’s record-breaking CloudFest Hackathon, including the winning projects, our partners, and some epic photos.
Game-Changing Hackathon Projects
We are thrilled to showcase the eleven exceptional projects that emerged from the CloudFest Hackathon 2023, all of which have the potential to make a significant impact on the industry and the open web. From web applications to software tools, these projects represent the best and brightest ideas from the event’s talented participants.
The projects were selected based on a range of criteria, including innovation, impact, and technical complexity, and we are proud to have been the enabler of their development.
Results-Oriented Projects
To ensure that all the project teams had a clear and achievable vision for their work, we enlisted the help of two experienced hackers— Lucas Radke (Automattic) and Alain Schlesser (XWP)—who worked closely with our project leads. Together, they provided guidance and support in refining project ideas and setting goals for the hackathon.
Their contributions were invaluable in helping our teams to stay on track and make the most of their time at #CFHack2023!
And now, without further ado, here are the game-changing projects from CloudFest Hackathon 2023 that you’ll be hearing more about in the coming months:
Project Leads: Daniel Bachhuber and Adam Zielinski, Automattic
Goals: The team wanted to bring the entire WordPress development environment into the browser using WordPress Playground.
Achievements: They shipped three very promising demos:
- An in-browser IDE with support for mobile devices and offline via StackBlitz
👉 demo 1 - A tailored in-browser code editor and terminal that can be customized to specific app needs 👉 demo 2
- A VisualStudio code plugin that starts a WordPress server even if you don’t have PHP or MySQL installed 👉 demo 3 & demo 4
What’s next? These projects continue being developed on GitHub in the WordPress Playground repository. In the coming months, these code editing experiences will be tried and tested during various workshops to prepare it for the general WordPress audience.
👉 GitHub
Project Leads: Leonidas Milosis and Diede Exterkate, Yoast
Goals: Start creating a plugin that recalibrates the frequency of external requests happening from WordPress sites, for environmental and performance reasons.
Achievements: The team wrote a plugin with a couple of ways to automatically reduce a WP site’s external requests, thus decreasing its carbon footprint. Furthermore, they created an API that website owners can use to reduce the site’s external requests even further, depending on each site’s needs and functionalities.
What’s next? Implementations will be improved in order for the plugin to be considered production-level. If widely adopted as a canonical plugin, this project can potentially affect global Internet energy consumption considerably.
👉 Eco-mode website
👉 GitHub
Project Leads: Benjamin Trenkle and Harald Leithner, Department & Operations Coordinators at Joomla!
Goals: Implement a proof of concept for a multidomain solution for Joomla!
Achievements: The Joomla! Team finalized the proof of concept and started the main implementation. They also generated a lot of buzz in the Joomla!-Community about the project.
What’s next? Team Joomla! is planning the release of a new minor version for Joomla! in April, and also another major release this year. Therefore, the focus shifted a bit. The Multidomain-Solution is targeting Joomla! 6, where it is planned to have several additional sprints to finalize it.
👉 Joomla! Community
Project Leads: Anton Akhtyamov, WebPros
Goals: Create a CLI utility to analyze the file structure of a web hosting server and identify the frameworks, and CMS used in the websites hosted on it.
Achievements: The team added the identification of multiple technologies and frameworks as well as to the following CMS: WordPress, Joomla!, Drupal, PrestaShop & TYPO3. They also created a sample integration of the utility to the Plesk web hosting panel – to show it’s possible to integrate into any software. It’s also possible to make it work as a CLI utility on UNIX servers.
What’s next? Integration into Plesk Panel to identify the technologies and provide reliable instruments for customers.
👉 GitHub
👉 Video Demo
Project Leads: Lucio Sá, Codeable
Goals: Improve an existing tool to perform security checks against plugins in runtime, create better static checks, and report the findings.
Achievements: We significantly increased the tool’s power, allowing it to find real vulnerabilities in published plugins. The tool is published and available for free on GitHub.
What’s next? To clean the codebase and create even better checks to increase the attack surface and lower the false positives.
👉 GitHub
👉 WPHackCebola website
Project Leads: Can Kirca, Senior System and Accessibility Specialist
Goals: Discuss and suggest sustainable solutions to improve accessibility in interactive tech events by creating a checklist for event organizers. Create a conditional form to collect and identify special requirements of the people who have a type of disability prior to the event. Create an open source platform to list attendee experiences.
Achievements: We created and integrated a website and GitHub repo, a conditional requirements form, and published PDF and DOCX formats of the accessibility checklist and guidelines.
What’s next? Prepare and publish the contact form on the website. Publish a page listing attendee experiences per event. An announcement board will be created to be used by future event organizers.
Project Leads: Marko Feldmann, Ionos
Goals: Build a notification service for WordPress users that utilizes a personalized Wapuu character to deliver messages.
Achievements:
The team created a website and several social media accounts, built the infrastructure for a proof of concept plugin streamlining the codebase and ensuring compatibility with a wide range of WordPress installations.
They also built various APIs to hook into with the plugin, allowing users to create their customized Wapuu with ease and flexibility, all while assuring an intuitive user experience.
What’s next? The team continues to make progress on WapuuGotchi. Stay tuned for more updates.
Project Leads: Milana Cap, XWP
Goals: Build an engine for searching through code examples from WordPress code reference and WP-CLI documentation.
Achievements: Everything the team had planned, plus they added two more sources: PHP code reference and WordPress Dev notes from the WP Core blog.
What’s next? All hackathon participants continue contributing to the project: they are working on moving it to a more sustainable place, setting up the workflows and docs for continuous contribution and adding more features, identified during the hackathon.
Project Leads: Florian Brinkmann, web developer
Goals: Working on improvements and new features for the Statify plugin.
Achievements: Made good progress, worked on different issues, created new pull requests, and merged a few of them.
What’s next? Some work has already been done since the hackathon, mainly for preparing version 2 of Statify and getting a few more features ready for the release of Statify 2.0.
Project Leads: Andrew Hutchings, MariaDB Foundation
Goals: To add MariaDB Server health information to WordPress’s admin panel, so that any database problems are easily observable. Because a healthy sea lion helps keep Wapuu healthy too.
Achievements: MariaDB Server version end-of-life checks, some performance graphs, server variables displayed, one-button optimizer histogram enablement, Site Health integration, dashboard summary panel, and Spanish translations. Basically, everything is for a beta release.
What’s next? In the meantime, the project moved to the MariaDB Foundation GitHub account as an official MariaDB Foundation project, also in the WordPress.org plugin repository: Version 1.0.1 is released (mostly bug fixes). Also, licensing of the MariaDB Foundation sea lion has been set. More features and metrics are to be added soon, considering feedback from the community as to what they would like to see.
👉 Plugin link
👉 GitHub
Project Leads: Andrey Lippatsev and Johann Hofmann, Google
Goals: Raise awareness of the Privacy Sandbox in the developer community and create a helpful tool for developers and site owners to better understand how third-party cookies depreciation will affect them.
Achievements: The team made 100+ developers aware of the Privacy Sandbox, including the Executive Director of the WordPress OS project. They created a Chrome DevTools extension to visualize and classify cookies.
What’s next? Parts of the team will continue looking at improving classification and I will look into ways to ensure the tool is going to be maintained.
👉 GitHub
Hack for a Purpose: Friendly Competition at #CFHACK2023
At CloudFest Hackathon 2023, we wanted to do more than just recognize outstanding projects – we wanted to make a real impact. That’s why we partnered with the Groundbreaker Talents initiative, a program that funds scholarships for vocational training centers in Uganda specializing in development and IT education.
Thanks to the incredible contributions of our attendees and the unwavering support of our partners and the open-source communities, we were able to raise €3,500 for this worthy cause. We’re thrilled to announce that World Hosting Days GmbH has added another €1,500, bringing our total donation to €5,000—enough to fund a full scholarship for a future female developer in Uganda.
By supporting Groundbreaker Talents, we aim to help create a sustainable livelihood for young developers in Uganda, while also contributing to a better, and more diverse open web. We’re proud to have played a part in this effort and can’t wait to invite the scholarship recipient to join us at CloudFest Hackathon 2024!
CloudFest Hackathon 2023 Award Winners
At CloudFest Hackathon 2023, a distinguished panel of eight judges—including the Head of CloudFest Hackathon, the two project mentors, and representatives from our partners and open-source contributors—had the tough job of selecting the winners in the following award categories
Eco-mode: Reduce outgoing network traffic of your WordPress server
Visionary Catalyst Award, sponsored by Automattic
docs_dangit: A search engine for WordPress developers
Dream Team Award, sponsored by Codeable
Eco-mode: Reduce outgoing network traffic of your WordPress server
Future of The Web Award, sponsored by WebPros
Wapuugotchi
Social Media Master Award, sponsored by Team “Wapuugotchi“
WordPress Runtime Vulnerability Analysis
Pitch Perfect Award, sponsored by stella.maris-solutions
Overall Hackathon Winner
After much deliberation, we’re thrilled to announce the team emerging as the ultimate #CFHack Champion at CloudFest Hackathon 2023:
Eco-mode – reduce outgoing network traffic of your WordPress server
Congratulations to the talented and dedicated project leads and team members who brought this game-changing project to life.
This award has been proudly sponsored by Extendify
CloudFest Hackathon 2023 Photos, Project Websites, and Media Coverage
Check out the photos from the event on the CloudFest Hackathon Flickr page:
👉 Hackathon Flickr
👉 Hackathon Attendee and Partner images
Blog Posts, Articles, Podcasts, and more
👉 WP Tavern
👉 WP Sofa
👉 Maria DB Foundation
👉 Yoast Eco-mode
👉 Webwisser
👉 Birgit Olzem’s Blog
👉 Bernhard Kau’s Blog
👉 Wapuugotchi Blog
Hackathon Review on the CloudFest Arena Stage
Our Head of CloudFest Hackathon, Carole Olinger, and star emcee Jeff Hardy took to the Arena stage at CloudFest to share their thoughts with the CloudFest audience on the incredible energy and creativity that characterized the event. Together with some representatives from the teams, they discussed the impressive projects that emerged from the hackathon, as well as the strong sense of community and collaboration that made it all possible.
Be sure to check out the CloudFest Arena recordings for their full recap of the unforgettable #CFHack2023 experience!
#CFHack2023 Eye Candy
