September 3, 2025 — There are many job seekers in WordPress. There are many job openings. And there are plenty of opportunities to freelance. So how do the right people find the right jobs? As someone who has been tweeting weekly job openings for years, and who has a keen interest in seeing the ecosystem thrive, I’ve been (unofficially) working to help people find jobs – and helping companies learn better recruiting. So how does one find a job? How do you hire well? How do you make sure someone is a good fit for your culture? And how do you determine if a position is right for you? Or do you chuck it all and decide to freelance instead? This talk will highlight three things job seekers can do (or do better) in job searching, and three things employers can do better for recruiting. And a few things to think about before you hang your own shingle instead. Attendees from either side of the hiring table will leave this talk with actionable items to improve their prospective opportunities. Presented byMichelle Frechette

September 3, 2025 — Join us for an insightful session on WordPress Campus Connect, an exciting new event series designed to bring WordPress directly to educational institutions. This session will provide an overview of the program’s progress so far, highlighting the impact on campuses and the engagement with students and faculty. The session will also feature a dynamic panel discussion with WordPress Campus Connect organizers and students, offering firsthand perspectives on the program’s influence and its potential to foster a deeper understanding and use of WordPress within academic environments. Attendees will gain valuable insights into how these events are bridging the gap between education and open source technology, creating opportunities for innovation and collaboration in the campus setting.

September 3, 2025 — Managing a handful of WordPress sites is tough. Now imagine 150 — with one marketing team, zero developer bottlenecks, and no chaos. In this session, Jakob Trost shares how CANCOM used Full Site Editing, smart templates, and content automation to build a scalable, no-code website system. You’ll see how centralized assets, synced templates, and dynamic logic enable lightning-fast rollouts — with consistent design and blazing performance across every site. Learn how the team slashed coordination overhead by 60% using frontend collaboration, integrated global forms with Salesforce (local overrides included), and built a system where new sites go live without a dev ever touching a line of code. If you’re managing multiple WordPress properties — or planning to — this talk will show you how to turn WordPress into a true enterprise system. Presented byJakob Trost

September 3, 2025 — Technology is always evolving and WordPress is no exception. If you are stuck with a Classic theme on an old website or just aren’t sure how to deploy a block theme, you will learn how to easily and quickly refresh and update your site. No page builder is needed. We will explore examples of websites that were built in 2018 or earlier that are now fast and fresh with the WordPress 2025 theme. You will leave this session with confidence and skills to bring your technology up to modern standards. There will be time for Q and A. Presented byMary Ann Aschenbrenner

September 3, 2025 — Gutenberg excels at crafting beautiful static content, but what if you could empower anyone to build dynamic, interactive web experiences directly within the block editor? This session dives into Block Composability, a powerful concept that enables the creation of rich, interactive content using blocks, making advanced web development accessible to even less technically inclined users. Join Seth Rubenstein (Head of Engineering, Pew Research Center) and Max Schmelling (Engineering Team Lead, WordPress VIP) as they showcase real-world applications of Block Composability, including: Large census-like databases Quizzes used by universities and schools across the country Pivot tables Discover practical methods to empower your users to create their own interactive web experiences. Explore new APIs like Block Bindings and a sneak peek at Block Bits, along with tools that connect the concepts of Block Composability and remote data using WordPress VIP’s Remote Data Blocks.

September 3, 2025 — The Core Performance team has been incubating enhancements for WordPress through the Performance Lab plugin. These have been available for a few years now; some have been merged into core (e.g. Speculative Loading) while others are more experimental and remain in testing (e.g. Optimization Detective). This talk will look at how these performance plugins impact the speed of a stock WordPress site running the Twenty Twenty-Five default theme, using Core Web Vitals benchmarks and Lighthouse scores. It will also look at how the theme’s performance can be further tuned, including the use of core patches proposed for the next major release (also available in plugin form to leverage today) to further accelerate the loading of pages to improve the user experience of site visitors. Presented byWeston Ruter

September 3, 2025 — What happens when you take the Gutenberg editor out of WordPress? This talk explores how we decoupled the block editor from wp-admin and the loop, embedding it into a standalone React application to power custom editorial workflows—while still saving to a traditional WordPress database. We’ll start with the fundamentals: how Gutenberg’s architecture works inside WordPress, and what changes when you go headless. From there, we’ll dive into advanced techniques like simulating the global wp object, managing custom @wordpress/data stores, replacing core/editor with core/block-editor, and implementing undo/redo history manually. Whether you’re building bespoke publishing tools or curious about what’s possible when Gutenberg breaks free from WordPress, this session will give you practical insights and patterns for integrating the editor into decoupled platforms—without losing the power and flexibility of the WordPress ecosystem. Presented by Josh Bryant

September 3, 2025 — In May 2025, the Jim Joseph Foundation found itself in a quandary. Their outdated, low-performing website needed updates and a redesign to better engage their audience. Using theme switching technology, we found a way to transform their website quickly, align with WordPress’s block-based architecture, enhance the user experience, and support streamlined, flexible content creation, all within the constraints of a limited budget. This agile, iterative approach enabled us to add a WordPress Block Theme, allowing their team to convert the website over time gradually. The result is a website that not only meets their technical needs but also reflects their mission to inspire Jewish youth and young adults in the United States to lead connected, meaningful, purpose-filled lives, contributing to their communities locally and globally. Join us as we share how we utilized conditional logic to serve up multiple themes on one website, enabling the Jim Joseph Foundation team to build and replace legacy templates with new block-based templates iteratively, using their existing website templates and layouts. This approach ensured a seamless transition, giving the Foundation team the confidence that their website was evolving without disrupting their operations.

September 3, 2025 — If you’re an agency owner, your name and reputation are as valuable as your service offerings. In this session, marketing and thought leadership strategist Kelly Schuknecht will show you how to grow your influence and attract higher-caliber clients by building a strategic content platform starting with the website you already have. This isn’t about SEO hacks or redesigning your WordPress site. It’s about using your existing content channels—blogs, case studies, podcast episodes, and client results—to position yourself as a go-to expert in your niche. You’ll learn how to stop hiding behind your agency brand and start leading with your expertise. Because when you build authority, you build opportunity. Presented byKelly Schuknecht

September 3, 2025 — WordPress Multisite is a powerful feature for managing multiple sites within a single installation; however, its complexity often discourages developers and site owners from utilising it to its full potential. This session breaks down what makes Multisite useful and what makes it hard, then explores ways to simplify its features and improve the user experience. We’ll look at practical, real-world enhancements that can make working with Multisite more intuitive for everyone, from developers setting up new networks to administrators managing dozens of sites. Along the way, we’ll cover current limitations, discuss ongoing improvements in core and plugins, and share actionable ideas that you can apply to your projects. Whether you’re building with Multisite today or just curious about what it can do, this talk will help you approach it with more clarity, confidence, and creativity. Presented byDennis Ploetner