September 30, 2026 — WordPress powers over 43% of the web, yet many sites – especially those by NGOs, small businesses, and local organizations – operate with minimal security resources even the government. Drawing from my experience investigating database breaches, website defacements, and plugin vulnerabilities, including government and private sector systems in Nepal, this session presents practical, zero-budget strategies to secure WordPress sites.

The talk covers hardening wp-config.php, role-based access control, brute-force mitigation, and native WordPress security mechanisms, along with techniques to detect early signs of compromise and respond effectively in resource-constrained environments. Beyond technical steps, it emphasizes the importance of security awareness, mindset, and ongoing maintenance to maintain resilience against evolving threats.

September 30, 2026 — WordPress powers millions of sites, but great support is what keeps users confident and successful.

In this 10-minute lightning talk, I’ll share practical lessons from real-world WordPress support experience—what users actually struggle with, common mistakes supporters make, and how small changes in communication can dramatically improve outcomes. The talk will cover how to approach support with empathy, ask the right diagnostic questions, and guide users toward solutions instead of confusion.

September 30, 2026 — This talk explores how WordPress can be used for community-driven projects and to empower NGOs, Schools, and Students.

Thousands of nonprofits and schools work tirelessly to create change, but they lack a digital presence and technical ability to share their work with the world. At the same time, students learning web development often struggle to find meaningful real-world projects or mentorship. Code for Charity bridges that gap.

Using WordPress as our foundation, we’ve built and deployed sites for national and international non-profits, completely free of cost. We’re teaching public school students web development and helping them build their own school’s website. In every project, students work in teams and receive mentorship from experienced WordPress developers. We’ve partnered with different companies to provide mentorship and internships to outstanding students, after the project is completed.

For organizations, these websites have helped them reach donors, hire and engage volunteers, and communicate their mission more effectively. For schools, their students learned practical skills, and schools get visibility.

In this Lightning Talk, I’ll share the story of how Code for Charity grew from a simple idea into a community of changemakers using WordPress for social good. I’ll discuss the challenges we faced, like maintaining quality in volunteer-built projects, partnering with companies for experienced mentorship, and how we went from running without funding to receiving generous support from Paymentology (UK’s Top-20 Enterprise Fintech), and the impact we’ve generated. This talk will offer a real-world look at how technology, especially WordPress, can create a sustainable impact. Attendees will be motivated to volunteer for a cause, build similar initiatives, foster collaboration, and use WordPress as a platform not just for blogging and business, but for connection, empowerment, and change.

September 30, 2026 — Getting people to your website has never been easier. Keeping them interested, earning their confidence, and turning visits into real outcomes is where most WordPress sites struggle. This session focuses on that gap between traffic numbers and actual growth, and why trust is now the most important factor in modern SEO.

We will look at how search engines and users think today, and why clarity, site experience, content quality, and transparency matter more than ever. Using simple, real examples from WordPress sites, the session explains why many websites look optimized but still fail to convert, rank consistently, or build long-term credibility.

Instead of focusing on hacks or plugins, the discussion centers on fundamentals. How clearly your site explains what it offers, how fast and usable it feels, and whether visitors can quickly trust the people behind it. These details may seem small, but they strongly influence rankings, engagement, and conversions.

September 28, 2026 — What if you could tell WooCommerce what you want in plain human language and have WordPress actually execute it?

With the introduction of the Abilities API in WordPress 6.8, WordPress has a more structured and declarative way of exposing what it and its plugins can do. This opens up interesting possibilities not only for developers and other plugins, but also for AI agents and tools such as MCP.

In this practical session, Marco Almeida will take us through the WordPress Abilities API and show how it can be used to build more structured and AI-friendly WordPress integrations.

What we’ll cover

What the WordPress Abilities API is and why it was introduced
How it compares to traditional WordPress hooks and integrations
How WooCommerce is already using the Abilities API
How to create custom abilities in your own WordPress plugins
How abilities can make WordPress functionality easier for AI agents and tools such as MCP to understand and interact with
A live demo using a real existing plugin, showing how WooCommerce can be controlled using natural language
The goal is to move beyond talking about AI and see what this looks like when it is actually connected to a WordPress site.

Presentation Slides »

August 20, 2026 — Every WordCamp needs a great send-off, and this year, we’re doing it the way our community actually talks to each other: two chairs, a real conversation, and a room full of people who get it. Think of it less like a keynote and more like the best hallway conversation of the week, just given a mic and a stage. The conversation we’ve all been having comes to the big stage. WordPress is evolving alongside AI, changing user expectations, and a rapidly shifting web. How do we keep open source thriving? What should we hold onto? What needs to change? And where do we go from here? That’s what this conversation is about. Not prepared talking points, but an honest discussion between two people who’ve spent decades helping shape, support, and steward the WordPress ecosystem from different perspectives. Even better, it doesn’t end on stage. The final 30 minutes belong to the community, with live audience Q&A. Two perspectives shaped by decades in open source. Ma.tt Mullenweg has helped guide the project since co-founding WordPress more than twenty years ago, while also leading Automattic and its portfolio of products supporting publishing, commerce, and the open web. Robert Jacobi has spent his career guiding organizations build, secure, and scale open source technologies, contributing across hosting, infrastructure, community leadership, and digital strategy. Together, they bring two distinct perspectives on the opportunities, challenges, and decisions shaping WordPress today. It’s a conversation grounded in years of experience, but one that’s ultimately about where the project goes from here and what that means for everyone building with it. The best conversations don’t end when the session does. By the time Wednesday afternoon arrives, you’ll have spent four days learning new skills, meeting people from across the community, and sharing ideas that continue long after the event ends. This conversation is a chance to zoom out and connect those experiences to the bigger picture. Expect an honest discussion about open source, the evolving web, AI, community, and the future of WordPress. Then, the conversation opens up to you. The final 30 minutes are dedicated to audience Q&A, giving you the opportunity to ask questions, share perspectives, and be part of the discussion that closes out WordCamp US 2026.

August 20, 2026 — AI is quickly becoming part of everyday work for WordPress teams, but in many cases we are still using it in a very limited way: asking isolated questions, retrying prompts, and manually feeding context into every conversation. Whats next is not simply using better prompts. It is learning how to delegate. In this session I will check how agentic development, is a new way of structuring repositories, workflows, and AI tooling so coding agents can operate with memory, reusable processes, and external awareness instead of acting like one-time chat assistants. I will look at why this changes the way modern WordPress teams think about development, delivery, documentation, and internal knowledge sharing, and why the competitive advantage in the near future will not come from access to AI itself, but from how well teams learn to organize AI execution.

August 20, 2026 — Two clients showed up with the same UX problem: visitors land on a complex site and can’t find the right path forward. One project ended up shipping a GPT-powered search block. The other shipped a deterministic, persona-driven block on rails, no AI at all. Both worked. Neither was wrong. This talk walks through both production engagements side by side. The AI search block, built for a community college’s 643-course catalog, comes with the production-hardening list nobody mentions in the demos: rate limits, kill switches, prompt-injection mitigations, token ceilings, and cost predictability. The persona-by-goal Mosaic block, built for an industrial services company after their legal team rejected an AI chatbot SOW, comes with a different lesson: deterministic UX, full editorial control, zero model cost. Attendees leave with a framework for when an AI block belongs in a project and when a deterministic block does the same job better, plus a reusable persona-by-goal pattern they can adapt on their next engagement.

August 20, 2026 — Plugins are how most WordPress users solve problems, and for good reason. But there’s a point where adding another one starts to hurt. Performance gets shaky, updates break things, and your site ends up depending on a chain of small tools nobody fully understands. This talk is about recognizing that point. How do you tell when a workflow has outgrown its plugin? How do you move that logic somewhere else without losing what made WordPress easy in the first place? We’ll work through real examples, like a membership flow that started as three plugins and became one automation, and a CRM sync that stopped breaking once it left the plugin world. Most WordPress talks assume the right answer is always to find the right plugin. This one is honest about when the right answer is to stop adding plugins.

August 20, 2026 — Product builds. Partnerships open doors. Most companies treat these as separate functions that meet quarterly to align. Deals close on promises the roadmap doesn’t reflect, integrations ship that no partner actually asked for, customer feedback dies in notes that nobody on the product side ever sees, and the next big partnership opportunity fades away because nobody connected the dots in time. The presenters have been working this loop together for years. They’ve seen what happens when the loop holds and what happens when it breaks, and they’re shaping how a business operates around that hard-won pattern. In this talk, they’ll walk through partnership decisions made without product context and what they cost, product decisions made without partnership context and what those cost, and key moments where the loop worked and value compounded. They’ll talk candidly about AI as a tool running the loop with them: surfacing patterns across partner conversations and product signals, drafting the first version of things humans then sharpen, and making it possible for a small team to hold more of the big picture at once. The argument isn’t that AI replaces either role. It’s that AI, used well, makes the loop between them faster, sharper, and harder to drop. Expect concrete examples, honest failure stories, and a working model you can take back to your own team whether you sit on the product side, the business side, or somewhere in between.