May 1, 2025 — Autumn Fjeld Candy Tsai February 22, 2025 10:00 AM Meeting Room 12 – Balagtas (Room 3)​​With recent Gutenberg advances in block patterns, block bindings, and the Gutenberg Editor there is a new interface paradigm for custom post types and custom fields on the horizon. We’ve been experimenting with these block technologies to create an entirely Editor based approach to custom data management, including exporting a “take it to go” data model plugin. Let’s discuss!

May 1, 2025 — The Automattic Special Projects team helps interesting people, projects, and organizations have a great experience with WordPress. By connecting their partners with the best that the WordPress community has to offer, the team spreads enthusiasm for WordPress and open source in general. This session will showcase both the front and back-end of a range of website builds, highlighting how the team uses the latest WordPress features to push the boundaries of block theme design, and how these projects contribute back to Automattic and the WordPress community at-large.

May 1, 2025 — Let’s face it, usability testing can seem daunting. When should you do it? How do you conduct tests and extract useful information? And, perhaps most pressing, how much time and money will it take? As a UX certified professional with the world-renowned Nielsen Norman Group and a WordPress agency owner for the past six years, I’m intimately familiar with these questions, and now I’m going to share with you my secrets of how qualitative user testing can help you take a WordPress website from good, to great.

In this session I’ll provide answers to the main questions that website owners (or creators) need to answer when it comes to usability testing: What even is usability testing and what does it test for? When should I test my site, and how often? How can I run usability tests without a gigantic budget or team? How much time or money will it cost me? Join me and learn about the most cost effective UX research method at your disposal, and learn how to leverage it to build stuff better.

May 1, 2025 — In this session Matías will be talking about how does WordPress move forwards while remaining true to its essence? In order to simplify the user experience, it is important to understand what are the core ideas and primitives that articulate the software. We’ll take a look through the Gutenberg roadmap and imagine a WordPress of the future that is both intuitive and powerful.

April 30, 2025 — The internet has revolutionized how we share information, enabling unprecedented collaboration and accelerating human progress in ways once unimaginable. However, this powerful tool is now at a crossroads. In this talk, Aaron will explore the critical role that open systems and the open web play in shaping our future. He will delve into the potential consequences of a closed digital ecosystem and argue why preserving the openness of the web is essential not only for innovation but for the very fabric of our global society. Discover why the future of the open web matters more than ever—and what’s at stake if we lose it.

April 30, 2025 — In this candid talk, I’ll take you behind the scenes of my journey from running a WordPress web design agency to building a multi-million dollar plugin company. While the talk will be structured around my personal story, it will be packed full of actionable insights on how audience members can build a successful WordPress product company of their own. It won’t contain any fluff or hype – just real experiences and practical advice. In this rapid-fire lightning talk, I will condense my best advice into bite-sized nuggets, with signposts to deeper resources. Basic structure: My story – A brief overview of my story from agency owner to plugin entrepreneur. Why the shift? – I’ll share the motivations behind my transition in a way that the audience can identify with. Was it the right move? Did it meet my expectations? Blueprint for success – Discover the exact strategies that fueled my plugin company’s growth and how you can do the same. Selling strategies – Explore different product-selling models and the importance of customer lifetime value. Should you go freemium, subscription-based or SaaS? I’ll share data-backed insights. Marketing magic: Learn which channels yield the best results. I’ll share data from Barn2’s marketing secrets. Customer love: How to keep customers happy by providing effective support. Team building: I’ll share my story of growing a team from nothing and the best way to do this depending on the size of your business. Whether you’re an agency owner, a freelancer, product owner, or simply curious about the transition, this session will provide actionable insights and inspiration. Join me as I reveal the pivotal moments, the unexpected twists, and the strategies that transformed my career.

April 30, 2025 — The WordPress ecosystem thrives on rapid innovation and fast-paced project delivery, but what happens when the pressure to perform leads to burnout? Through an engaging conversation James will explore real-world challenges faced by WordPress businesses and agencies and offer proven solutions to help leaders balance high expectations and essential employee support. Attendees will walk away with: Actionable strategies for building a culture that prioritizes mental health without sacrificing productivity. Recognize early signs of burnout and implement preventive measures. Leadership techniques to set clear boundaries, foster psychological safety, and promote sustainable productivity in remote and distributed teams. Insights into creating a long-term, thriving team culture supporting performance and well-being.

April 30, 2025 — In this talk, you learn how to use blueprints to pre-configure a Playground instance to showcase your plugin or your theme and make it available to potential customers. After the talk you will know how to add content, additional plugins, data and enable necessary setting to make the demo or test site as close to a real-world examples as possible. You provide your audience with one-click testing solution, without worry on server load or security access.

April 30, 2025 — Hari Shanker Isotta Peira February 22, 2025 10:00 AM Meeting Room 1 – Rizal (Room 1) Over 43% of the web runs on WordPress, yet there is no clear, transparent way to track contributions or identify areas needing the most help. Hari Shanker and Isotta Peira are full-time sponsored WordPress Contributors and Community Program Managers, have been acutely aware of this problem. They have been working on a host of community programs and have also been focusing on improving the contributor experience of WordPress. For a while, they have been thinking about the best way to guide WordPress contributors to projects that need help and how to make an impact with the help of clear data. Through this session, Isotta and Hari plan to advocate for a WordPress contribution dashboard that will solve these problems. Both Hari and Isotta experience the frustration of not having a transparent system to visualize contributions and identify gaps. Without this clarity, valuable contributions may go unnoticed, and critical areas in need of support might be overlooked. They believe that by implementing a system to track and display contributions across the WordPress project, the community could be better informed, more strategic, and more united in its efforts. This visibility would not only help direct resources and energy to where they are most needed but also recognize and celebrate the efforts of all contributors, fostering a stronger, more cohesive community committed to the growth and success of WordPress. Additionally, they advocate for collecting and analyzing metrics on how visitors use WordPress.org. Understanding user behavior on platforms like Learn.WordPress.org, WordPress.tv, and the documentation pages can provide insights into what resources are most valuable, where users struggle, and what areas need enhancement. This data would enable a more user-centric approach to improving WordPress.org, ensuring it serves the community’s needs more effectively and continues to support the growth and development of the WordPress ecosystem.

April 30, 2025 — We’re witnessing a fundamental shift in how humans interact with digital content. For decades, browsers have served as our gateway to the web, translating human intent into clicks, searches, and navigation through visual interfaces. However, the rise of AI assistants and Large Language Models is introducing a radically different paradigm – one where natural conversation replaces point-and-click, and personalized AI agents become our primary interface to digital services. This shift has profound implications for content creators, publishers, and businesses in the WordPress ecosystem. As users increasingly interact with content through AI intermediaries rather than direct browsing, the traditional focus on visual design and user interface might give way to structured data and semantic meaning. We’re already seeing this transition begin with AI-powered search and voice interfaces, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg. We’ll explore how this transformation could reshape the content landscape: The evolution from linked pages to AI-synthesized insights backed by referenced sources How content might need to be structured differently to serve both human browsers and AI agents ? The potential shift from visually designed websites to content APIs and machine-readable formats The changing nature of content discovery and consumption For WordPress users and developers, this presents both challenges and opportunities. We’ll examine: How to prepare your WordPress content for AI consumption and discoverability Strategies for maintaining relevance in an AI-intermediated world Ways to leverage WordPress’s strengths in content organization and metadata Practical steps to optimize your digital presence for both traditional browsing and AI interaction The importance of structured data and semantic markup in the age of AI Most crucially, we’ll discuss the broader implications for the open web and digital publishing. What happens when AI assistants become the primary gatekeepers of content? How do we maintain content authenticity and attribution? What role will traditional CMS platforms play in this new landscape? This talk provides practical insights for content creators, developers, and business owners to prepare for and thrive in this emerging paradigm shift, while examining the potential risks and opportunities it presents for the WordPress community and the web as a whole.