Since WordCamp Brasil 2025 and my participation in the 45th WordPress Meetup Belo Horizonte, the idea of organizing an online meetup to bring together the entire Brazilian community stuck with me. So after aligning on the best way to create this meetup, I started the process to apply as a meetup organizer, and on May 11 I got access to the meetup page for the WordPress Brasil Meetup Online.
Since the WordPress 7.0 release was a little over a week away, I got a message from Caio Ferreira asking if I wanted to use this opportunity to make it a release party. And I thought this was a great idea! So I created the event and talked with Caio, André Ribeiro, Christian van ‘t Hof and Felipe Velzani about presenting some of the new features together.
To better organize what everyone would talk about, I created a Google Doc listing all the main changes, based on sources like WordPress 7.0 Field Guide, WordPress 7.0 Source of Truth, Kinsta WP 7.0 release post and a video from Fellyph Cintra about AI in WP 7.0. For each item I listed some guiding notes (including additional links) and tested each one myself to become a little more familiar with them. Then I aligned with each of the other four people on what they would feel most comfortable talking about and added their names at the beginning of each topic, until all of the main topics were covered.
To help with the event promotion, I created a post in the Brazilian WordPress News site, and other local meetup organizers helped by sharing it on their social media accounts and meetup page announcements.
Before the event started, we all joined a bit earlier so we could finalize how we would present and in what order. Once the event started, we did some introductions between everyone on the call, which gave more people time to join. Before starting the presentation, I quickly put on a pair of flashing LED glasses I had, to make it official that the release party was starting!
We presented the new features by either sharing our screens and showing them live or just talking about them. We invited everyone to ask questions and also to share any insights they had about the release. This created a very open conversation between everyone, and a lot of them actively participated, which was awesome. About 30 people joined the event, and it lasted almost 2 hours.
It was a great experience, and I almost felt like we were all in the same room exchanging ideas. Thanks again to André Ribeiro, Caio Ferreira, Christian van ‘t Hof and Felipe Velzani for helping with the presentation, to all the local meetup organizers who helped promote the event, and to everyone who joined and participated in the conversation!
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