November 6, 2026 — In this hands-on workshop, Arun Shenoy and Tremi Dkhar show how the Create Block Theme plugin speeds up building Full Site Editing (FSE) block themes, making theme creation approachable even with minimal coding skills. Topics covered: getting started with the plugin, developing an FSE theme from the Site Editor, and exporting your editor changes to theme files.

November 6, 2026 — A beginner-friendly workshop by Bigul Malayi and Swetha B Chandran introducing WordPress hooks. It explains what actions and filters are, why WordPress relies on them, and how to use them in your own code, with practical examples and a tour of commonly used hooks.

November 6, 2026 — What Six Years of WordPress Support Taught Me About Building Better Plugins

Great plugins aren’t built by adding more features, they’re built by understanding the people who use them. Drawing from six years of hands-on WordPress support, this session explores the recurring patterns behind user frustrations, the importance of customer feedback, and how support insights can shape better plugin architecture, UX, documentation, and error handling. Attendees will leave with practical ideas they can immediately apply to build more intuitive, reliable, and user-focused WordPress products.

Key takeaways
Turn recurring support issues into better product decisions.
Improve plugin UX using real user feedback.
Reduce support requests with better onboarding and error handling.
Build WordPress plugins with a customer-first mindset.

November 6, 2026 — Wooing WhatsApp with WordPress: A SaaS Story

What if WordPress could power more than just websites and stores? In this talk, I’ll share the journey of building WA.cr, a SaaS platform that connects WooCommerce and WhatsApp to help businesses sell directly through chat. Picture carts, payments, customer conversations, and even location collection – all happening inside WhatsApp, while WordPress quietly handles everything behind the scenes. Along the way, I combined familiar tools like WordPress and WooCommerce with low-code workflow automation, picked up JavaScript the hard way, and discovered how far WordPress can be stretched. This is a builder’s story: one that turns a handful of open tools into a complete product. If you’ve ever wondered how far WordPress can go or just love seeing it used creatively, this talk is for you.

Key takeaways
WooCommerce usable as WhatsApp Catalogue and WA order back in Woo

November 6, 2026 — Many times, “Go headless” becomes the default advice for almost any WordPress project, while other times it gets dismissed outright as unnecessary complexity. Neither instinct is reliable on its own. This session gives you an honest, practical framework for making the call either way, based on what your specific project actually needs.

We’ll break down what actually changes when you strip WordPress down to a content API and hand the frontend to a separate framework, and look at real scenarios on both sides: where headless genuinely solves a problem traditional WordPress can’t, like omnichannel content, high-performance frontends, or teams already working in React or Vue, and where traditional WordPress remains the stronger, simpler choice. Along the way, we’ll cover the layer most headless builds get wrong: authentication, and how the choice between Application Passwords, JWT, and OAuth changes what your project can and can’t do.

This isn’t a talk about which architecture is “better.” It’s about learning to diagnose a project correctly before you commit to one, because that decision ripples into everything downstream: what a client can edit themselves, what an SEO strategy needs to account for, what a plugin ecosystem can or can’t do for you, and what a build actually costs to maintain long after launch.

Key takeaways

A clear, two-sided framework for deciding when headless WordPress is worth the trade-off, and when traditional WordPress is still the better call.
A real look at what you gain and what you give up when you decouple WordPress: performance and flexibility on one side, plugin ecosystem dependencies and editorial simplicity on the other.
A practical comparison of authentication methods (Application Passwords, JWT, OAuth, cookie-based auth) and when to use each.
The right questions to ask on any project, as a developer, an agency, or a client, before committing to either architecture.

November 6, 2026 — Search is changing. More people are getting answers directly from AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity instead of clicking through traditional search results. In this session, we’ll explore how WordPress site owners and developers can adapt by creating AI-friendly content, improving structured data, organizing documentation, strengthening internal linking, and building topical authority. You’ll leave with practical strategies and a simple checklist to help your WordPress site stay visible in the age of AI-powered search.

Key takeaways
Understand how AI search is changing the way people discover content.
Learn practical ways to make WordPress content easier for AI to understand and cite.
Leave with a simple checklist to make your website more AI-friendly.

November 6, 2026 — Artificial intelligence is no longer a future trend; it’s reshaping content creation, SEO strategy, and agency operations right now. But with so much noise around AI, how do you separate what actually works from what doesn’t?

Moderated by Kripesh Adwani and featuring panelists Puja More, Amit Singh, and Aashish Pahwa, this panel brings together experienced WordPress professionals and digital marketers to explore AI’s real-world impact on our industry. From writing content at scale and adapting to AI-powered search to managing client relationships and growing a sustainable agency. The conversation will be grounded, practical, and honest.

Whether you’re a freelancer figuring out your next move, an agency owner rethinking your workflow, or a marketer trying to stay ahead, this session will give you perspectives and insights you can act on.

Key themes:

How AI is changing content strategy and what it means for quality
SEO in the age of AI search: what still works and what doesn’t
Agency growth and positioning in an AI-driven market
Practical AI tools and workflows for WordPress professionals

November 6, 2026 — One WordPress, Thousands of Websites: Engineering Multisite at Scale

A plugin, database query, scheduled task, or configuration change may work perfectly on a single WordPress website. But what happens when the same operation runs across hundreds or thousands of sites within one network?

This talk explores the engineering and operational challenges of managing large-scale WordPress Multisite environments. Drawing from anonymised real-world production experiences, the session will demonstrate how seemingly minor technical decisions can create network-wide performance issues, unexpected server load, database bottlenecks, or widespread outages.

The session will look at how WordPress behaviour changes when operations are multiplied across a large network. It will cover common problems such as plugins performing expensive network-wide queries, cron events running independently across thousands of sites, background processes overwhelming infrastructure, and deployments introducing a much larger blast radius than expected.

The talk will also walk attendees through the lifecycle of a typical Multisite incident—from identifying unusual resource usage and investigating logs to isolating the affected functionality, containing the issue, restoring normal service, and implementing long-term safeguards.

Key areas covered will include:

Database operations and queries across large Multisite networks
Cron jobs, scheduled events, and background processing at scale
Plugin deployment risks and network-wide activation
Monitoring, logging, and identifying the source of performance issues
Staged releases, testing strategies, and rollback planning
Reducing the blast radius of failures
Building WordPress functionality with scale in mind
The objective is not simply to explain WordPress Multisite, but to highlight the engineering mindset required to operate it reliably at scale.

Attendees will leave with practical insights into how to evaluate code, plugins, scheduled processes, and deployments when a single technical decision can affect thousands of websites. The session will be useful for WordPress developers, hosting engineers, agency teams, system administrators, and anyone responsible for maintaining large or business-critical WordPress platforms.

Key takeaways
Why code that performs well on a single WordPress site may cause serious issues across a large Multisite network.
How database queries, cron jobs, background processes, and plugin actions behave differently at scale.
How to identify and investigate network-wide performance problems using logs, monitoring, and resource usage patterns.
Why staged deployments, controlled rollouts, and rollback plans are essential for large WordPress platforms.
How to reduce the blast radius of failures and prevent one change from affecting thousands of websites.
How to evaluate plugins and custom functionality with a Multisite-first engineering mindset.
Practical approaches for building more stable, scalable, and maintainable WordPress Multisite systems.

November 6, 2026 — Turn Your WordPress Site into a RAG Knowledge Base

AI is changing how users interact with websites, but generic AI models often lack knowledge of your site’s unique content and can produce inaccurate or outdated responses. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) solves this problem by combining the power of large language models with your own WordPress content.

In this session, you’ll learn how to turn a WordPress website into a reliable AI knowledge base. We’ll walk through the complete RAG pipeline—from extracting content using the WordPress REST API or sitemaps, to cleaning and chunking content, generating embeddings, storing them in a vector database, and retrieving the most relevant information to produce accurate, source-backed responses.

We’ll also explore practical implementation choices for PHP and WordPress developers, including vector databases along with best practices for keeping your knowledge base synchronized as your content changes.

To bring everything together, the session will include a live demonstration of an AI assistant answering questions using only the content from a WordPress site, complete with links back to the original pages.

Whether you build client websites, manage documentation, run an online store, or maintain a content-rich website, you’ll leave with a clear understanding of how to integrate AI into WordPress in a practical, trustworthy, and scalable way.

Key takeaways
Understand what Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is and why it’s more reliable than using a standalone LLM for website content.
Identify the WordPress content sources (posts, pages, custom post types, WooCommerce products, etc.) that can be used to build a knowledge base.
Understand the complete RAG workflow—from content extraction and chunking to embeddings, vector databases, retrieval, and AI-powered responses.
Gain practical insights through a live demonstration of building an AI assistant powered by a WordPress website.
Leave with a clear roadmap to implement RAG in their own WordPress projects.

November 6, 2026 — By the end of this session, you will have built a WordPress site on your own laptop, connected an AI assistant to it, and watched that assistant publish a post, change a setting, and install a plugin, all from instructions typed in plain English.

Then you will switch one of those capabilities off, ask again, and watch it refuse.

AI is quickly becoming part of how people work. It writes emails, answers questions, and helps make decisions. But what if AI could also run your WordPress site for you?

Imagine asking your site in plain English:

“Which posts are missing a featured image?”
“Update the price of my top 10 products.”
“Show me all draft posts from the last month.”

And it just… does it. No opening the dashboard, no clicking through menus.

Most site owners have no idea this is already possible, and almost nobody has decided what they would allow.

In this hands-on session, we’ll start with what a WordPress site actually needs to run, a web server, PHP, and a database, and why that used to be the wall most people never got past. Then a local site in about a minute, and a look at something most site owners have never seen: the complete list of everything their site is willing to let a machine do.

Along the way, the two ideas that make this work:

The Abilities API, added in WordPress 6.9, which lets plugins publish what they can do in a format machines can read.
MCP, the open standard that lets AI tools discover and call those abilities.
Then we’ll get our hands dirty. You’ll register your own custom abilities in code, expose them through MCP, connect them to an AI client like Claude, and watch Claude call the abilities you just wrote to perform real operations on your site. We’ll end with the moment that matters most: you switch an ability off, ask again, and watch the AI refuse.

Whether you run client sites, manage an online store, maintain a content-heavy blog, or build plugins, you’ll leave having written the code that makes your WordPress site AI-ready, so you can manage its operations without ever hitting the dashboard.

Key Takeaways
See what your site already exposes. Find the complete list of what your own site permits. Most attendees have never looked.
Write your own custom abilities in code. Learn how to register abilities that expose exactly the operations you want AI to perform on your site.
Be able to revoke access in under a minute. You’ll do it during the session, so you know where the button is before you need it.
Leave with a working setup and a clear roadmap. A local WordPress site connected to an AI client, custom abilities you’ve written yourself, plus a checklist you can apply to a live client site the same week.