Last year’s trip to Basel was my first WordCamp. I didn’t quite know what to expect, which meant I was less prepared than I should have been. This year I started planning way in advance, and thanks to Claude Design I arrived with a master plan.

The conversation starter – Rock, Paper, Scissors

I’ve never been one to walk up to people and strike up a conversation, so I knew I needed an opener to get the rock ball rolling. And what’s better than the nearly universal game of Rock, Paper, Scissors. The rules are simple, you don’t have playing cards etc to carry around, and it’s quick to play for people with limited time.

If you win, you can pick a 1 year license for one of my WordPress plugins, or browser extensions. If you lose, you could get a 30% discount (or try a second time).

My plan comprised of finding a suitable location to set up my laptop and trying to catch peoples attention. Those that might be interested would be likely to ask about it, while those that would rather cross the road to avoid someone with a clipboard can just walk on.

Simple, at least I hoped so! Without knowing the layout of the venue this part was the most risky.

At last years Freemius Maker’s Meetup I talked to a a lot of people about my then hero plugin Administrator Toolkit. To help save my voice this year I asked Claude Design to put together some lanyard inserts.

I started with Play To Win, then moved on to ToggleWP. After finding another plastic pocket I put together a couple more for Website Toolkit and Missing From Cart (just in case I spoke to any WooCommerce people).

With the touch screen game, and 4 inserts ready, I had a huge amount of marketing material prepped compared to last year (which was writing a domain name on the name card….).

That’s the prep work out of the way. Let’s get travelling!

Wednesday

I had a mid afternoon flight which was due to land at 7pm and slightly optimistic 8pm – 9pm dinner plans with Blake, his wife Shay (whom I met for the first time at WCEU 25) and Elliot. I was delayed leaving a bit due to baggage issues, but still arrived on time!

However, as the UK isn’t part of the nice and easy travel zone any more, I had fears of EES queues at the airport. Thankfully my flight wasn’t around any other international ones and after hot footing it off the plane (being in Row 9 outbound was handy) I was 10th in the queue for passport control.

What I had feared would take 30+ mins took about 5, result! As I was traveling alone, and on a budget, I needed the 300 bus towards ICE rather than a taxi. Thanks to the quick EES queue I had about 5mins wait till the next (frequent bus). I was making good time to check in before heading back out for dinner.

While on the bus I found out Katie had shared a taxi with Blake & Shay earlier that afternoon, so we all headed out for dinner to kick off the networking.

We had originally planned on a river boat restaurant, which turned out to have a private party and wasn’t open. Fortunately we ended up at another local bar / food place not too far away (after a rather loud exit from the 1st potential place that put on heavy death metal music when we approached it…).

The food was tasty, but as I was talking so much I forgot to get a pic of my main (Asian noodle curry). Being a slow eater, and also talking a lot meant it took a while but it was good to talk shop with Blake as he is my ideal customer for ToggleWP.

I did have to stop talking and get chomping, as I’d spied this on the way in. Due to some language confusion I almost ended up ordering 7 slices (there were only 5 there), instead of paying separately for 3 slices.

The first group photo of the trip.

After dinner it was a short walk back, stopping to get the first night time pic of a major landmark with scaffolding. My wife and I have a joke about things we want to see having work done so it was only fitting.

Thursday

The original plan was to do some sightseeing, however the weather had a different plan in mind, and was a bit wet.

As Katie is very well connected she let me know that some of her mastermind group were meeting up in the old town, where we could get some work done for a bit while chatting. We met up with James from WooCommerce outside the hotel, and headed over the river to meet Steve from WP Fusion.

While chatting at that hotel I decided to get a quick bit of work in, adding a feature that Blake had suggested the night before. That justified lugging my laptop around the rest of the day.

Later in the morning Leo from Barn2 arrived, along with Jack from WP Fusion as the weather improved.

We were all keen to get some fresh air and see the sights, so Katie loaded up a outdoor escape room walking tour for us to follow. After a couple of stops on the tour it was time for lunch, so Jack led us towards The Black Duck which was hidden down a side street.

Keen to try local food, I went for the beef dumplings, along with some home made (still) lemonade for our end of the table.

James went for the crispy potato pancakes, with mushroom sauce. As they were very filling both Katie and I tried a small slice as we were sitting within forks reach.

We were all full so we passed on pudding. They followed the meal up with a complimentary shot of Quince liquor.

It didn’t go straight to my head, and I didn’t try and spell it with a P, wondering why it was wrong. I’m not tired!

We continued our old town tour, and found the second landmark with scaffolding. Said scaffolding was over the trail clue we needed to look at, so I resorted to Google Street View to see the main door.

There were some amazing sights further on the tour. This one was spot the difference with the photo in the app.

Shortly after this point the group lost Jack and Steve (who needed to head back due to prior injuries), and the rest of us carried on to finish the loop.

As a reward for completing the challenges we went on a hunt for a local pudding, and after a couple of thousand extra steps found a nice doughnut shop for a sugar fix to eat on the move while on the way back to our various hotels.

We did pop by the venue to register, but it was after 5pm and that had closed. So we had a quick recon around the first couple of floors.

And snuck a quick photo op at the PatchStack booth.

Mid way around the tour Katie mentioned the big tower was the one from the hotel’s wallpaper, and being a typical bloke I hadn’t paid attention to my identical room when I arrived late on Wed, instead looking for the power sockets.

I checked when I got back, and yes, it did indeed have wall paper. I’m not tired!

That evening most of that afternoon’s group met up again in a different part of town, this time I tried the filled pancakes with spinach and feta cheese, with Garlic sauce on the side. This was a good choice.

The meal was washed down by a couple of cocktails at William Rabbit. It was a hidden place you needed to be escorted into (not that type) and was Alice in wonderland themed. I only had the two drinks but somehow ended up with a heavy head in the morning.

Friday

My first main day started off with the “How to make toast” workshop, after registration and collecting the t-shirt and bag (my wife has since claimed the bag after arriving home).

This was a good start to the day as it involved working with the person next to you, so it was a gradual start into making fresh introductions.

Mid morning I had chat with Héctor from the Modular DS team, my first pitch for ToggleWP to see if there are any chances of working together to promote it. My attempt at pitching a self-hosted plugin based offering that works alongside a SaaS style service didn’t go overly well.

After some confusion on my side about the direction their planned API’s were going to work (data flowing out, not passing data in as per MainWP) we ran out of time. He kindly requested a license for his team to take a look in case there could be some way to work together / raise awareness.

I chalked it down as a learning experience, and plotted how to adjust my next booked in pitch to WP Umbrella on the Saturday. This was a new experience, and nerves didn’t help me get my ideas across which did knock my confidence a bit.

I headed up to the top floor where there was a space and some high tables to set up my laptop, but using the excuse it was nearly lunch time I closed it up after a couple of minutes as I wasn’t in the right frame of mind.

Shortly afterwards I met up with Sam and Leo for lunch on the lower floor of the venue, after we eventually tracked each other down. For inclusive food it was very tasty. I didn’t pay much attention to the display board to see what it was, as the other snacks around the place looked good I was game for trying the main lunch as well.

In the afternoon I attended my second booked workshop of the day “Agentic AI” with Vito. That had a full crowd with several people were asked to free up space for those who had registered.

I nabbed a seat in the empty front row. Just like at school everyone avoids it so I had a good view of the big tv. The chap that came and sat at the front next to me joked about needing to sit closer as we were both older and needed all the help we could get.

Vito’s session overran a bit as there was a lot to fit in and the time flew. Thankfully the google doc with the work to use was shared out so I kept a copy to follow along back at home.

As Vito invested in Bertha.ai I couldn’t resist saying thanks for the session at the end, and letting him know that a new re-imagined version of it will live on in ToggleWP.

That evening it was the Freemius Makers Meetup from 5pm till 7pm ish, where I saw some familiar faces from 2025 and had a catch up. Towards the latter part of the meetup I had a chat with Mike from Web Change Detector, and booked in a demo of their service in the morning.

With my funky “Play To Win” lanyard I tempted another familiar face to have a go, and he won first time (without assistance).

Following on from this was the Woo party, on a river boat with a great view. A big group of us took a leisurely 20min walk along the riverside on the way up (out of shot on the righthand side).

Having had plenty of food at Freemius, their dessert table had a tempting selection.

The 2x winner was the apple tart, which was very good (and one of your 5 a day? Worth a shot).

As the sun started to set there was a good view of the castle as I walked back on the nearside of the river bank to complete the loop back to the hotel.

I’m fine with walking for ages, but after a couple of hours of standing still my poor desk worker feet were starting to cramp up so I said farewell and headed off into the sunset (ok, not quite, as it was behind me).

Saturday

Saturday was meant to start at 9am for a chat with Aurelio from WP Umbrella. I had a message from him at 3am saying he wasn’t going to make it, which I saw at 7am when I woke up.

As they were hosting a joint party with PatchStack the night before it wasn’t much of a surprise, so I rolled over and attempted to nod off again. It was very nice letting me know in advance, I’m surprised he thought about it at that time in the morning.

During breakfast I thought of talking to some smaller hosting providers to see if they’d be interested in any promo activity for ToggleWP, and had one in mind on the ground floor. It was staffed with 2 of their team, and while 1 was busy talking to a couple of people in front of it the other was sitting down on his phone looking very uninterested.

After waiting for a couple of minutes to see if he would look up I decided to save my time and headed to the front of the venue for a quick snack before my 10am demo with Mike from Web Change Detector.

Both Mike and his colleague were friendly and welcoming, and I was given an in-depth walk-thru of their service + their soon to be released visual refresh. After chatting the night before I was thinking of ways it could link in to ToggleWP and my Content Health Monitor module.

After the demo I was then coming up with ideas of how it could work with my refreshed Website Toolkit service. There could be some potential to work together, and this’ll be one area I need to think about over during the next couple of weeks on a direction to take.

As it was nearly 11am on the 2nd day, it was time to put my game face on and set up the laptop.

During the Friday I scouted the venue for good spot I’d be comfortable in, my goldilocks zone. A bit like Earth’s position in the universe, it had to be far enough away from sponsor booths (they were paying big $$$ and I doubt would be pleased with someone freeloading right in front of them), but also not in the middle of nowhere that people wouldn’t pass.

Thankfully there was an open area behind the Elementor booth, next to a snack stand and the bottom of one set of stairs. I’m not entirely sure if its the 1st or 2nd floor, but it was a spot I was happy with.

As someone who is normally quite an introvert, this was a wholly new experience for me, and makes me glad I’m not working in sales. Judging who to try and talk to, or catch their eye of is an art form.

I didn’t have any time to learn, so I went with a gut feeling of who was heading off to a Track / Workshop, vs those just wondering with no fixed schedule. I personally do my best to avoid going near clipboard warriors patrolling town centres, so I had to do my best not to act like one of them. Which was easier said than done.

The reactions from people was a mixture of “Yeah, go on. I’ve not played that in years” to “…. no thanks”, and a mix between.

One of the first few players was a chap from Cloudways. Their sponsor booth was up in the far corner near Workshop 2, and he was tasked with finding plugin developers to talk to. After a couple of rounds (to make sure he won) I did a brief summary of ToggleWP before handing over my details. As they would have a lot of reseller based customers I was keen to get the ICP across so it would be more of an interest. Shall see what comes from that!

The advantage of being a multiple plugin person, is that I have something to pitch to nearly everyone depending on how they use WordPress.

When I was chatting with Katie at breakfast that morning she asked how I was going select people who would be interested in ToggleWP to try and play. I said I was going to try and get anyone to play first, follow that up by finding out how they are involved in WordPress, to then tell them about the most suitable match, or matches.

This did involve quite a bit of thinking on my feet, and worked nearly every time. The hardest one to pair up was a couple of chaps from an agency building larger WooCommerce sites. My Missing From Cart would be too niche for them, however big shops have a lot of product categories, so I talked about “Just Add Search” and gave a quick demo of the ToggleWP module which offers that.

Other people heard about “Fill in the Blanks”, and also Nag Me Not (browser extension) for support teams investigating issues on other’s sites.

On other occasions some friendly faces were passing and joined in a couple of games, helping to play on human nature. If you see someone else doing something that could be different / interesting they pay more attention

After both Blake and Elliot had a couple of goes there were some others that then asked what I was doing and joined in for a game as well.

Katie stopped by for a minute and asked if I’d spoken to MelaPress yet, as their owner Robert was walking down the stairs towards us. On his way past she said hi, and that he should stop and have a chat with me about my plugins.

For an owner at that level you don’t want to take up too much time when they are running a booth as it was fairly non-stop. Having had a bit more practice on my pitch I covered the key pointers of who ToggleWP was aimed at and its key benefits, before connecting with him on LinkedIn and saying I could send over some details during the week.

It’s very handy having well connected friends. After working for myself for nearly a year, having key people on your side offering advice and encouragement is not to be taken for granted.

After another tasty lunch (not the best photo), I had a video interview with Jimmy The Webonaut to talk about ToggleWP. He is just as friendly as he is on camera. We headed to one of the upper levels where there was less background noise and walking past for a chat.

It was my first go at a video interview, so I attempted to talk a little slower and clearer so he’d have some chance of worthwhile material.

After that interview and another quick snack break it was back to my usual spot, via a longer route to allow the person currently at the table finish up.

Slightly later on a Barfly member from The Admin Bar Facebook Group stopped by, wearing their Admin Bar t-shirt, which was a good sign as TAB members are my ideal audience. After a couple of rounds (dropping some hints to help them win) I gave the most in-depth product tour of ToggleWP of the weekend.

When someone gets it, and what you are talking about just “clicks”, it gives you a huge confidence boost. As a lot of feature ideas came from similar people in the FB group, or on X, talking about problems they’ve had over the years, I knew just the order (more or less) to cover the bits that can save you time and headaches, to the here’s how it could help with other areas.

I didn’t track the time but we spent somewhere between 20 to 30mins talking about ToggleWP. She filled in the winners form instantly to claim her ToggleWP licenses when I send them out. After she left I realised I only had 10mins until my next booked meeting with Vova from Freemius.

Last year I had a meeting with Vova, where the first part was missed as we were in the same area but I didn’t see him behind a pillar from where I was sat. This year when I passed him on the Friday I got his WhatsApp so it wouldn’t happen again this time, given the size of the venue.

We headed over along with another team member to the Q-Hotel for a quieter chat, a nice break from the busy venue. I talked about the highlights of ToggleWP, and Website Toolkit, with the idea of pitching a free audit for fellow plugin developers in the Freemius Slack.

This would be a win-win-win for all of us as I could get some extra test subjects to help uncover issues, get some feedback, other plugin owners could have an audit they might not normally run on their sites, plus Freemius can have a crawl of their site to find any issues which could be mentioned in any notice on Slack or in a newsletter.

I started the crawl during the meeting, but as it runs in a slow and polite way I said I’d send over the results later on.

As it was now mid afternoon and the venue was getting warmer it was the right time to visit the ice cream station for a salted caramel and chocolate cone.

While I was having the ice cream Lana wondered passed so I took the chance to say hi as we hadn’t met the previous year.

By this point I was mentally tired, and needed a break. As the fireside chat / closing sessions were going to be on the live stream I headed back to my hotel for some down time. My laptop needed a break as well having randomly dropped from 30% to 5%.

Barn2 Team meal

Before the after-party I was invited along to the Barn2 team meal. I’m part of the Services Team (not an employee), so it’s nice to feel part of a larger team given the solo business life most of the time. Sam was tasked with finding us a venue, and found a very traditional and authentic restaurant.

Sam was keen to try the pink soup, so with extra spoons to hand out we all sampled a slurp.

Before sharing a plate of Duck dumplings, very tasty.

My main was a 1/2 portion of the beef stew and crispy potato pancakes, along with a mixed salad. This was well worth the wait (in getting around to trying them on the trip, rather than service there).

We were all quite stuffed, so we passed on pudding (the special was sweet dumplings) as we were rather dumplinged out.

During the meal I realised I forgot to check-in earlier that afternoon, as the app had decided again to forget my booking. I tried to do it but was constantly met with this error, which was very unhelpful.

During the rest of the evening I kept trying in case it was a temporary service issue without any luck. As I had no issues on the way to Poland this did take the edge of the evening’s enjoyment, wondering if I’m going to make the flight or not.

It was now time to head for the after party. As there were celebrations on in town, and we had just missed the tram, Sam ordered an Uber. Leo was heading off to meet his girlfriend and then head on the parade along the river so we said farewell.

Forty Kleparz Music Club was a lovely venue, and after taking a look around it we found a nice quiet room to chill and digest in.

Over time a few more familiar faces turned up for a chat, along with some we didn’t know. One of these was Matt Mullenweg’s older sister, who popped in for a little while with Bob, before they headed off to see others.

As I still wasn’t having any luck with the online check-in I messaged the airline on X, in the process reading a pinned post about fake accounts reaching out to steal identities.

A little while later an account messaged publicly asking for me to DM them my details, I was about to message when I checked their username…. yup, a scam account. Being rather tired and at that point 3/4 of a beer down it was closer call than I’d have liked.

The official account reached out quite a while later, and asked to confirm details of the booking. It turned out the flight was under control of the local airport, but they didn’t know why. On the plus side I still had a booking, but on the down side I needed to be there even earlier to go thru in-person check-in like its the 90’s.

While the party was going on till 4am, I bailed out early at 11pm to catch the last bus back to my hotel. It should have been a 25min trip, but due to the crowds leaving the parade it stopped mid way and ended up taking nearly 45mins – the same time as it would have been to walk it. I killed some time by getting a ticket ready for use on Sunday as the free travel pass ran out at midnight.

Sunday

I got up and packed early, and ended up getting the 9:30am bus as it was between that and the 10am one. About 6mins away from the airport, at its last scheduled stop on an upwards slope, the side doors decided they weren’t going to stay closed and kept opening after a few seconds.

The driver tried for about 10 minutes to get them to stay shut, before asking us to abandon bus and get on the next one that was coming in 5 minutes time. In a comical way, as the bus drove off the side door stayed shut.

I hopped on what would have been the 10am bus, so in the end it didn’t matter.

Eventually we all made it to the airport, and I walked around for a bit waiting for the check-in desk to open. On the second tour of the hall I spotted the signs for BA, and waited around at the start of the queue. When they eventually opened I was first to get checked in, to find out the reason why online wasn’t possible was due to it being a full flight and bags needed to be checked in.

I bid farewell to my cabin bag and kept my laptop as I headed off to join the security queue. After that I grabbed a quick snack to take for lunch, not knowing what was the other side of passport control.

The EES queue at passport control was empty.

In a matter of minutes I was past that, and at my gate along with 3 other people.

As I wasn’t travelling with the kids I sent a photo of the plane home to show what they were missing.

Unlike LHR, this airport had working chargers by the seats so I topped up my phone and laptop just in case. Which was good, as the plane home was an old one and no charging ports onboard.

Once again it said it would be a little late leaving, but ended up landing ahead of time which was handy. On the return trip I had to make my own way back, via bus, then train, before getting picked up by my wife and youngest at the railway station.

“I’m not tired” – my phrase for the trip

I’m a light sleeper, and while the hotel had blackout curtains they didn’t block the top or the sides out. Over the several nights I tried a few different ideas to block light, like coat hangers leaning on the curtains.

As I had the large umbrella borrowed from Steve’s hotel that came in handy on later nights to try and block out a bit more. This was the final attempt to raise it a little higher, not perfect but worth a try!

That’s a wrap for part 1.

Part 2 will be coming soon (ish), in that I’ll cover the plugin discussions I had, and plans I have in mind for products and services over the coming weeks.