August 18, 2026 — What does it take for a group of volunteers to evolve a website with 20+ years of history through multiple CMS onto one that runs on a current and modern stack? This case study will look at what it took to give a face lift to a legacy site.

August 18, 2026 — Editorial teams are leaving WordPress, not because it can’t handle their content, but because the default admin experience makes it feel like it can’t. Writers face a cluttered interface built for developers. Editors have no clear approval workflow. And when stakeholders compare WordPress to tools like Sanity, the gap feels obvious: structured content, clean review flows, role-based UX. So teams migrate. They add headless layers, adopt new CMSes, and spend months and lots of money rebuilding what WordPress already does, just hidden under the wrong interface.

August 18, 2026 — Daily Kos isn’t just a media publisher, it’s a 20-year-old community where readers write, organize, and show up every single day. When it was time to migrate 1.5 million posts, 2.7 million users, and 88 million comments off a custom-built CMS, the technical challenge was only half the problem. The real risk was losing the trust of the people who fund 90% of the platform. In this session, the CTO of Daily Kos, and the staff engineer walk through what it took to migrate a community-first platform: The scale: 1.5M posts, 2.7M users, 88M comments, and two decades of technical debt The decisions that mattered: architecture choices made around user psychology, not just infrastructure What we learned and what we’d do differently How we ran a fully public beta with 500+ vocal community members, and what we learned

August 18, 2026 — Anyone can vibe-code a plugin in an afternoon. Most of those plugins can’t go anywhere near a business-critical site (and you know it the moment you read the code). Learn how to build your own AI pipeline that ships plugins you can actually deploy: secure, performant, and built to the standards your senior engineers enforce in code review.

August 18, 2026 — We spend a lot of effort making the editorial experience good for humans — clear blocks, sensible constraints, guardrails that keep content on-brand. It turns out those same rules are exactly what an AI agent needs to publish well. This talk walks through the key tenets of a strong editorial experience in WordPress with Gutenberg, then demos how agents use the very same structure and constraints to produce on-brand content without breaking your visual integrity. Build it right for editors, and agents come along for free.

August 18, 2026 — There’s a common narrative that publishers are leaving WordPress for Substack. Don’t believe the hype. The Ankler is the case that runs the other way — and it’s a case worth studying. With 15 newsletters and around $10m in annual revenue, The Ankler is one of Hollywood’s most respected insider publications. In April 2026 it moved off Substack onto a fully owned and operated WordPress site, giving the business direct control over its platform, data, and reader experience. This is what happens when a publication outgrows a platform built for individual creators. This talk looks at what that transition actually took, and why it made sense at this stage of the company’s growth. We migrated tens of thousands of posts and media files, with one all-or-nothing export that can hang for 28 hours, no images in the dump, and no comments, authors or SEO data at all. We reconstructed thousands of hand-placed paywall boundaries, and mapped a single Substack paid tier onto six Passport audiences, adopting Passport as the new paywall, membership, and newsletter infrastructure while it was still in beta. But the transferable lessons go beyond migration mechanics; they also include how the site was designed. Instead of Figma, we built directly in the block theme we’d chosen, selectively codifying designs into templates, patterns and a child theme, deciding in real time where flexibility mattered and where it introduced risk. The result is a publication with direct ownership of its content, subscriber data, revenue logic, and reader experience. This talk makes the case that for media companies serious about independence, WordPress isn’t the platform people are leaving. It’s the one they should be building on.

August 18, 2026 — LLMs are here and they’ve already disrupted software development at every level. Revolutions are messy, fraught with challenges, risks and disruption as the status quo evolves to make room for new ideas. Large language models can dramatically improve productivity, but they also confidently output plausible garbage. This session is about getting the speed without surrendering responsibility. I will be live demoing Claude Code in a terminal by interrogating a real WordPress plugin codebase and working backwards into the workflow that helps make it trustworthy: having Claude itself maintain a CLAUDE.md “project contract”, requiring a plan for major feature development and using a verification loop where changes aren’t pushed unless validation checks pass. We’ll dig into common points of failure that matter in real projects—hallucinated assumptions, approval fatigue, and the licensing/attribution questions raised when AI tools ingest open source—and how to work in a way that treats the model as untrusted by default.

August 18, 2026 — AI can now write, test, and ship code with almost no human keystrokes — so why does developer trust in its output keep falling even as adoption climbs past 84%? The answer isn’t a tooling problem, it’s a taste problem. AI isn’t eliminating developer work—it’s moving it. Time saved writing code now reappears in specifying intent, assembling context, supervising agents, verifying changes, and owning the outcome. AI mostly reshuffles a developer’s day away from typing and toward judgment calls: what to delegate, what to verify, what to reject outright. Drawing on real WordPress examples — the “almost right” bug that passes every glance-test, the security debt hiding in AI-suggested dependencies, the new bottleneck of feeding an agent the right context — we’ll unpack what’s actually changing in developer experience, and why the developers who thrive won’t be the ones who prompt best, but the ones with the sharpest taste. You’ll leave with a practical model for working with AI—specify, delegate, verify—and a clear vision of the developer’s future role: writing less code, perhaps, but making more consequential decisions.

August 18, 2026 — They didn’t guess the password. They didn’t break 2FA, bypass the firewall, or trigger a single alert. The activity log shows no failed attempts, no unusual login times, no new accounts created. And yet, the attacker is inside your WordPress site, accessing your WordPress dashboard. Session hijacking leaves no login trace, because the attacker never logged in. They took an authentication cookie and reused an existing session. To WordPress, every request looks legitimate; the real user’s credentials, their 2FA, their login restrictions, none of it applies. The session was already authenticated. Most WordPress security advice is built around hardening and protecting, however, that leaves a critical blind spot: what happens after authentication succeeds? In this talk, we’ll walk through how WordPress creates and validates authentication cookies and session tokens, explore the real-world scenarios where sessions get stolen, and map out what an attacker can do with a hijacked session before the damage becomes visible. Then we’ll get practical. We will look into how session visibility, timeout policies, concurrent login controls, device recognition, and activity logging that captures post-login behaviour are the controls that catch what firewalls and 2FA miss. Firewalls, 2FA, and passkeys are essential. This talk covers what comes after them.

August 18, 2026 — Every agency has seen it happen: the site launches, the training session goes well, and three months later the content team has questions no one remembers covering. WordPress offers a huge amount of educational material, but most of it is not designed to be handed directly to a client team with real workflows, custom tools, accessibility needs, and editorial decision-making. This talk shares how Modern Tribe created Learn.tri.be, a reusable training system for WordPress and ModernPress that combines documentation, walkthrough videos, editor-focused guidance, and an AI assistant built directly into the WordPress editor. We’ll explore how teams can move beyond one-time training sessions and build scalable education systems that support content creators at the moment they need help most.