As you all may notice, if you are following me on the social media, I attended and gave a talk at very first WordCamp Kyiv #WCKyiv and it’s not over until you blog about it.

First time in Ukraine. First time in Kyiv.

It was a WordCamp Europe in Vienna when I found out the WordCamp Kyiv; this was a great opportunity for me to kick off the first in the series of case studies and talks on how we updated the theme on ManageWP. “Change your theme, but, keep your business” we can all consider as the first in the series; the sequels are in the making :)

Ukraine, land of many beauties

Bordered by Russia to the east and northeast, Belarus to the northwest, Poland and Slovakia to the west, Hungary, Romania, and Moldova to the southwest, and the Black Sea and Sea of Azov to the south and southeast, Ukraine is the largest country entirely within Europe.

According to Wikipedia, current Ukraine’s population is at 44.5 million, making it the 32nd most populous country in the world. Kyiv si the capital and the largest city in Ukraine with about 3 million (I had a feeling that Kyiv is way more that :) )

WP Kitchen and my homework

As I have already mentioned, this was a very first WordCamp in Kyiv, all until now there was a WordPress conference, but titled WP Kitchen. When you have a chance to give a talk in from of a 250-300 people, you better do your homework – try to prepare as much as you can.

A couple of things that I like to do before visiting the conference would be:

• Google maps and checking the city a bit
• learning about the country and its people (Wiki – History, a bit of Geography and facts about the country and the city I am visiting)
• Check the organizers and attendees lists
• check the photos of national cuisine (I am so into this!)

Getting to Ukraine and the first impressions

I knew that Ukraine and Kyiv are huge, but never expected this much :) Getting to Kyiv Boryspil International airport wasn’t a problem at all for me, since the every day, there are direct flights to and from Belgrade.

Got there in a bit early and thanks for organizers and helping out a page in English, I knew pretty much everything I needed. Kyiv introduced Uber and getting around the city wasn’t a problem at all. Oh, almost forgot, everything was super-cheap :)

WordCamp Kyiv 2016, conference

I was stunned when I went over there to the conference and saw about 80% attendees already at the Venue. We are talking about an hour before the actual Opening remarks – 80% attendees there, already networking – amazing!

Another thing and something that makes Kyiv WordCamp unique is the number of the questions asked for each session. I thought that having 30 minutes talks and 10 minutes for questions would be more than enough, but, believe me, I never saw any conference with that amount of questions. It was insane :)

Change your theme, but, keep your business

As I have already mentioned in the beginning of this blog post, “Change your theme, but, keep your business” is just a start of the case studies and first in the series, so I kicked-off ease with just an overview of the whole process.

Key takeaways from the talk would be:

• Plan everything!
• Backup everything!
• Remove the unnecessary before kicking-off the project
• Write down deployment steps. Don’t skip any!
• Test everything
• Staging environment is a must
• Hope for the best, but, work your a** off to make it happen

And for the end, let us all enjoy a couple of photos I took, during my stay in Kyiv. Thank you guys for a great time, thanks to organizers for the tour around the city, all the volunteers, sponsors and all the attendees. See you next year!