August 20, 2026 — Hook: Every dev on your team has their own pile of AI prompts and one-off scripts — which means every hard-won lesson stays trapped with the person who learned it, and the rest of the team keeps paying to learn it again. What if your team’s AI tooling lived in a versioned, reviewed, CI-enforced repo — the same way your plugins do? Take-away: a concrete starter pattern for a team-skills repo + the three policies that make it stick.

August 20, 2026 — Earlier this year I was the sole developer on a new WordPress site build. AI tools moved the work along, but only because I spent the project teaching them how to work in my way – correcting mistakes, capturing what I learned, and feeding it back so they wouldn’t repeat them over and over again. This talk is about that practice: teaching your AI tools your process as you go, so they get better instead of just faster. Two actual instances from the project as examples: A mega-menu nav with a dead click zone where the AI’s first move was a complicated JavaScript event handler – the actual fix was a few CSS utility classes on the link. A tangled Tailwind class string that smelled wrong before I could name why – four AI agents running in parallel helped me diagnose it, clean it, and codify a rule that’s held up since. What I’ve learned and my process improvements go beyond just writing code: Asking for HTML output instead of markdown when richer visualizations are helpful. Dispatching multiple models to get different viewpoints for comparison and brainstorming solutions. Keeping the lessons I’ve taught the tools portable so I don’t lose the learning when I migrate to a new model. My processes are still evolving and improving. This talk gives a snapshot of where I’m at now and attendees will leave with a new set of tools and perspectives to improve their own AI interactions, grounded in actual project work on a shipped site.

August 20, 2026 — AI is now embedded in plugins, themes, content pipelines, and client sites across the WordPress ecosystem. Most WordPress professionals have focused on what AI can do. Almost nobody has focused on what it requires of you legally This talk covers the compliance gap that agencies, freelancers, and product builders are about to run into: GDPR and data residency implications of AI tools processing user content, consent requirements when AI is involved in personalization or communication, the EU AI Act and what it means for WordPress businesses serving European clients, and disclosure obligations that are already in effect in some jurisdictions. These are not hypothetical future risks. They are current, and the WordPress ecosystem is largely unprepared for them. Attendees will leave with a practical checklist for auditing their own sites and client sites, an understanding of which AI use cases carry the most legal exposure, and clarity on what questions to bring to their legal counsel.

August 20, 2026 — Join Waymo’s Amanda Ventura and host David Levine for a fireside chat about earning public trust in AI that moves beyond screens and into the physical world.

Amanda works on Waymo’s public affairs team at the intersection of artificial intelligence and community engagement. By working directly with road safety and accessibility advocates, her team is helping shape a future of safer, more inclusive travel powered by autonomous driving.

David Levine is a member of the WordPress Core AI Team and Director of Growth Engineering at rtCamp. He brings more than a decade of experience working with nonprofits, NGOs, local governments, and organizations building technology people can rely on.

Together, Amanda and David explore questions relevant to anyone building with emerging technology:

How do you earn trust from people who did not ask for the technology?
How should communities help shape the products affecting their lives?
What does it take to maintain trust when safety and accessibility are at stake?

August 19, 2026 — The standard toolkit for custom WordPress theme development is undergoing a generational shift. Legacy bundlers, bulky frameworks, and guessing games with AI code completion are being replaced by lightweight execution environments, composable architectures, and rigid, deterministic code scaffolding. In this immersive, hands-on workshop, developers will dive into the future of theme development using WP Rig, the open-source progressive development starter theme and build tool system tailored for modern WordPress theme development. Participants will strip away development friction by moving into a completely automated local development environment powered by Bun and Lightning CSS, unlocking instantaneous feedback loops and hyper-optimized assets. We will dive deep into native WordPress Block support, exploring how to structure high-performance layout systems and map them cleanly to global styles. Next, we’ll unlock the true power of modern development: AI-Native Engineering. Attendees will discover how WP Rig’s structural blueprints interact seamlessly with AI coding agents. By leveraging codebases intentionally architected to minimize model hallucinations, you will learn how to turn your AI coding agent into a reliable pair-programmer for complex theme features. Finally, we’ll touch on the future of building “a la carte,” demonstrating how open-source component library paradigms allow developers to inject community-driven, plug-and-play features instantly into their projects without introducing theme bloat and increasing deterministic AI theme enhancements. Bring your laptop, leave legacy tooling behind, and discover how to write cleaner code faster while remaining fully aligned with modern WordPress standards. 🎯 What Attendees Will Learn (Learning Objectives) Directory-First QA Pipelines: How to leverage WP Rig’s native automated check suite to identify and correct code violations against official WordPress.org Theme Review guidelines. Modern Block & Hybrid Scaffolding: Safely integrating standard PHP-based code with block architectures, including flawless generation and testing of theme.json. AI-Guided Architecture (Agentic Workflows): Utilizing AI coding assistants alongside WP Rig’s structured structural blueprints to build error-free, custom block patterns rapidly. Blazing-Fast Tooling: How to bypass legacy configurations using an integrated build tool system designed for instant compilation feedback loops. 🛠 Prerequisites & Requirements Attendees should have a foundational understanding of PHP, CSS, and localized development. To participate in the coding portions, they will need: A laptop with a local WordPress development environment (e.g., WordPress Studio or LocalWP). Node.js/Bun and Composer installed locally. A code editor equipped with an AI programming extension (optional, but recommended for experiencing the agentic workflow elements). Directly Supports the Open Source Project: One of WordPress’s biggest needs is getting more developers to submit high-quality, block-compatible themes to the official directory. This workshop removes the intimidation factor of theme submissions and directly trains attendees to become directory contributors. Aligns with Core Innovation: The session balances the historical PHP strength of WordPress with modern Block paradigms and automated testing frameworks, providing a masterclass in how hybrid development should look in 2026. Solves the “Review Loop” Pain Point: By showing how the framework mimics the validation logic of the Theme Review Team, this workshop solves a massive developer pain point (waiting weeks for code-review feedback only to get rejected over basic formatting rules). It introduces an automated safety net.

August 19, 2026 — Every mature WordPress site accumulates plugins the way a garage accumulates boxes… one at a time, each for a reasonable purpose, until the whole thing is load-bearing and nobody wants to touch it. The problem is not that plugins exist. The problem is that most teams have no repeatable method for evaluating what they actually have, what is redundant, what is risky, and what can safely go. This talk walks through a practical audit playbook developed across enterprise WordPress sites with 40, 60, even 80+ active plugins. The presenter will cover how to inventory a plugin stack against actual usage rather than assumed need, how to score plugins for maintainability and risk, how to identify consolidation opportunities that reduce surface area without losing functionality, and how to sequence removals so the site stays stable throughout the process. Attendees will leave with an audit template they can run on their own sites the following week. Attendee takeaways A repeatable plugin audit method that goes beyond “”check the last updated date”” How to score plugins for real risk: maintainability, overlap, dependency depth, and data exposure A sequencing strategy for simplifying a plugin stack without breaking production Concrete examples from enterprise sites where plugin consolidation reduced maintenance cost and improved stability

August 19, 2026 — For years, WordPress engineers have lacked a globally recognized, professionally governed credential—an unusual gap in an ecosystem that powers a significant portion of the web. Employers have likewise struggled to reliably identify qualified WordPress engineering talent for mission‑critical work. To address this need, a small team at Automattic spent a year designing and building the new standards‑based Advanced Professional WordPress Developer Certification for WordPress developers, in partnership with Kryterion, a global leader in secure testing and assessment design. This session offers a behind‑the‑scenes look at how this credential was created, validated, and how it is structured, governed and delivered. We’ll explore what value credentials deliver to engineers and employers, and how they can expand access, equity, and diversity within open source communities. We’ll also discuss what additional credentials could emerge in the future. This session is ideal for engineers, employers, and anyone curious about the role credentialing can play in strengthening the WordPress ecosystem.

August 19, 2026 — If you’ve heard of the Abilities API at all, it’s probably in the context of AI in WordPress. That’s a valid use case and is what drove the development of the Abilities API by the Core AI team, but the Abilities API has a lot more to offer than just AI integration. This talk will help you understand those pieces and how they create a new fundamental architecture for the platform so you can start building with the Abilities API today.

August 19, 2026 — AI is rapidly changing the WordPress industry, automating repetitive tasks and reshaping what companies expect from developers. In this session, the presenter explores the skills that continue to create long-term value in modern WordPress careers — from performance, accessibility, and problem-solving to communication, systems thinking, and business awareness. Drawing from experience leading teams and working on enterprise WordPress projects, this talk examines how developers can adapt to AI-assisted workflows, stand out in a globally competitive market, and evolve beyond task-based development work. Attendees will leave with a practical understanding of how WordPress careers are changing and which skills are becoming increasingly important in 2026 and beyond.

August 19, 2026 — Walk through any enterprise procurement conversation in 2026 and one thing becomes clear: customers are no longer shopping for “WordPress agencies.” They are shopping for partners who can solve digital experience, content operations, governance, and editorial workflow problems at scale. Whether WordPress sits underneath is increasingly a technical decision, not a strategic one. This is not a problem for WordPress. It is a problem for how agencies in the WordPress space describe themselves. The argument of this talk is simple: the strongest agencies in the WordPress space have shifted from platform identity to outcome identity. They no longer come across as WordPress specialists. They come across as solution drivers. And that is what enterprise customers actually want to buy. The agencies that have already made this shift are having very different conversations. Different stakeholders in the room. Different scope and budget. Different competitive set. Customers stop comparing them to other WordPress specialists and start comparing them to other solution partners, which is a smaller and less commoditized pool to be in. None of this means abandoning WordPress. WordPress is still the substrate. Technical depth still matters. The shift is in how the agency is seen, not in what it actually does. Drawing from 17 years of enterprise WordPress engagements, this session explores what changes when an agency makes this shift, what stays the same, and why the agencies that look invisible from the WordPress side are often the most valuable to their enterprise customers. This is not a case against WordPress. It is a case for what comes next.