Author name: John

WordCamp Asia 2026 will be available to watch live across three days of streaming, making it easy for the global WordPress community to follow along from anywhere. This year’s live streamed programming begins with a special Contributor Day broadcast, followed by two full conference days of presentations from across the WordPress community. This post gathers each official stream in one place so you can quickly find the right broadcast for each day. Bookmark this page and return throughout the event to watch live. Day One: The Making of a WordPress Release Go behind the scenes of a WordPress release in this special Contributor Day live stream from WordCamp Asia 2026. Past release squad members come together to share stories, reflect on their experience, and talk about what it takes to bring a WordPress release to life. The Panel will go live at 4:30 am UTC. Day Two: Conference Livestreams Watch the second day of WordCamp Asia 2026 live for a full day of presentations and sessions. beginning at 4:00 am UTC, including a Fireside chat with Mary Hubbard, which will begin at 5:00 am UTC over on the Growth Stream. Foundation Growth Enterprise Day Three: Conference Livestreams Watch the third day and final day of WordCamp Asia 2026 live, beginning at 4:00 am UTC for another full day of presentations from across the community. Don’t forget to watch Ma.tt Mullenweg give the final keynote, which will begin on the Growth stream at 10:00 am UTC. Foundation Growth Enterprise You can also explore the full schedule to see what is coming up across the event and plan your viewing. However you join, we hope you will follow along and be part of WordCamp Asia 2026.

In this episode, Anne Bovelett chats with Dr. Christian Kurze discuss strategies for startups in open source CMS, emphasizing structured sales and sustainable monetization.

If you’ve been paying attention to LLM-based coding tools in the past few months, you’ll have seen a seismic shift in how they’re being used. Even 12 months ago, they were little more than glorified auto-complete tools: useful for quickly repeating patterns, but terrible at producing well structured, thoughtful, maintainable code. More recently, however, there seems to have been a new equilibrium reached, where an experienced engineer can guide these tools to consistently produce high quality code. Small course adjustments seem to have an outsized effect, resulting in the “Human in the Loop” paradigm that’s become so popular. Why It Works “Code is Poetry” has been my approach to writing code for as long as I can remember. Software is a form of expression, and the way you create that expression is through code. So, to make beautiful software, you need to write beautiful code. But, what happens when you don’t need to write code to create the software? Suddenly, the code becomes entirely about outcomes. It needs to be correct, functional, and maintainable, but it doesn’t need to be seen as a form of expression itself. Instead, the creative decisions move further up the stack, to the architectural level. You can write beautiful software by writing thoughtful specifications, instead. That’s not to say that technical abilities are suddenly obsolete. You still need to know what’s possible and realistic to be able to tell the LLM what to build, and to redirect it when it goes in a different direction. You need to be able to read and comprehend the code, you just don’t need to memorise every function signature. The Temptation So, if an LLM can write code for me, what else can it do? Marketing copy? Emails? Opinion blog posts? I could ask Claude to write 10 paragraphs on the “The Human in the Loop”, but would you have even read this far if you thought this post was LLM generated? Of course not! I can promise you that every word of this post (and every other post on my blog) was written by me. Respect for the Reader If I want you to read this post, and seriously consider the arguments I’m making, the least I can do is write it myself. It goes beyond that, however. LLMs can write functional code, but they can’t write beautiful software. When the text is the creative act, there’s no way for the LLM to write the text without compromising your creativity. If you’re the Human in the Loop for a blog post, you’re not injecting your voice, your perspective, or your personality into the post: you’re rubber stamping whatever feels good enough, and that’s a very low bar to clear. “Good enough” isn’t actually good enough. A measure of the complexity of a written piece of text is called “perplexity”. It measures the randomness of how the text flows, and it’s probably the thing you’re noticing when you know you’re reading LLM-generated text, but you can’t quite articulate why. It’s an uncanny valley thing: it looks like writing, it reads like writing, it might even flow like writing, but the vibes are off. The good news is, you’re not going insane, recent research shows that there is a measurable difference between human written text, and LLM generated text. LLM generated text is inherently less random, which makes sense when you remember that LLMs are, at their core, giant statistical models that are really good at figuring out “what’s the most likely bit of text to come next”. The LLM as the Assistant That’s not to say that LLMs are completely useless when it comes to writing, but we need to use them the right way. While they shouldn’t be generating text, they can absolutely be used to help you write. Over the last month or so, I’ve been working on Claudaborative Editing, an experiment to see exactly how much they can help with the writing process. I’ve been building it directly into the WordPress editor, allowing me to plan, write, review, and publish this post from the one place. An LLM assisted, but every word of it was written by me alone. My goal isn’t to replace the author, or to make it easier to fill the web with LLM-generated dreck, it’s to help me (and hopefully you, too!) improve your writing, while still keeping it fundamentally yours. Where Does Creativity Live? When you’re evaluating these tools, “can an LLM do this?” isn’t the question you need to ask. Instead, think about where the creative part of the process lives. For software, that’s in the design decisions and the architecture, the final product is the expression of that creativity. The specifics of the implementation don’t really matter. For a blog post, or any writing for that matter, the creativity lives in the act of writing. To delegate that to an LLM is to delegate your own creativity. Here’s what I believe: the best uses of LLM tools are when they augment humans, rather than try to replace them. They enhance the inherent creativity of their human operator, they don’t suppress it. This belief guides how I use LLMs, and how I build tools that help others use LLMs, too. I’ll be pushing out a new release of Claudaborative Editing in the next few days, I hope you’ll give it a go!

It’s very cool to see Theo / t3.gg‘s open source arc. Just in general, with people creating more software than ever, it’s so exciting to see an explosion of open source and a growing understanding of why working together on open source makes so much sense for the future we want to build.

Sending emails back and forth with potential customers just to find an appointment time is a huge waste of time that often leads to lost sales. When you’re stuck managing a calendar all morning, you can’t focus on actually serving your clients. That’s why I recommend accepting appointments directly on your WordPress website. This can save you hours every week and keep leads from falling through the cracks. I’ve tested several scheduling tools, and I found that Sugar Calendar Bookings is the best way to automate your bookings. It’s powerful enough to handle complex scheduling, yet simple enough to set up in less than an hour. In this guide, I’ll walk you through every step to set up a professional booking system. By the end, you’ll have a hands-free system that accepts appointments and takes payments while you sleep. TL;DR: I recommend using Sugar Calendar Bookings to automate your appointments and keep clients on your website. The free version lets you set your hours and accept Stripe payments, while the Pro version adds advanced features like staff management and buffer times between meetings. Here are the topics I will cover in this tutorial: Why Your Business Needs a WordPress Booking System Step 1: Installing the Sugar Calendar Bookings Plugin Step 2: Creating Your Professional Services Step 3: Setting Your Availability and Working Hours Step 4: Connecting Stripe for Automated Payments Step 5: Adding the Booking Form to Your Website Managing Your Booking Schedule and Growth Frequently Asked Questions About WordPress Booking Systems Additional Resources for Managing Appointments Why Your Business Needs a WordPress Booking System I often see business owners hit what I like to call the ‘manual booking ceiling’. This is the point where administrative busywork, like chasing down clients and trading endless emails, starts to take more time than actually running your business. While many people start with third-party tools like Calendly, I’ve found that hosting your own booking system on WordPress offers massive advantages over using a separate SaaS platform: Total Brand Control: When you use an external link (like calendly.com/your-name), you send your clients away from your website. This creates a ‘branding leak’ where they lose your site’s navigation and may even see the third-party’s logos or suggested services. Keeping them on your own domain builds trust and keeps their focus on your business. No Monthly ‘Subscription Tax’: Most SaaS booking tools charge a recurring monthly fee for essential features like Stripe payments or custom reminders. Using a WordPress plugin like Sugar Calendar Bookings lets you own the system and keep more of your revenue. Secure the Revenue: Plugins like Sugar Calendar let you request a deposit via Stripe upfront to make sure clients are committed to the appointment. I’ve found this is the most effective way to filter out people who aren’t serious about your time. Better SEO and Analytics: When a client visits your internal booking page, it counts as traffic for your site, helping your search engine rankings. If you use an external tool, they get the SEO benefit and the customer data, not you. When your business is small, you can get away with a paper planner or a simple contact form. But as you grow, you cannot afford to spend hours doing manual admin work instead of running your business. By moving to an automated system, you reclaim your time and remove the friction that prevents your business from scaling to the next level. Tip: If you don’t have a website yet, I recommend using WordPress. It is the most flexible platform for small businesses, and you can see my guide on how to start a WordPress website to get set up today. Step 1: Installing the Sugar Calendar Bookings Plugin Before you can start booking clients, you need to install the plugin. Sugar Calendar Bookings is a standalone WordPress plugin. There are two versions you can choose from: Sugar Calendar Bookings Lite: This is the free version, and it is the one we will be using for this tutorial. It includes everything you need to get started, including free Stripe integration for accepting payments. Sugar Calendar Bookings Pro: This is the premium upgrade. I highly recommend it as your business grows and you need advanced features like managing multiple staff members, assigning specific working hours per employee, and creating custom email templates. If you need help, you can see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin. Step 2: Creating Your Professional Services Once the plugin is activated, the very first thing you need to do is define exactly what your clients are booking. In Sugar Calendar Bookings, these are called ‘Services’. You can create as many as you need, such as a ’15-Minute Discovery Call’ or a ‘Full 1-Hour Consultation’. To get started, navigate to Bookings » Services in your left-hand WordPress dashboard menu and click the ‘Add New’ button. On the ‘General’ tab of this screen, you will start by entering your Service Name. I recommend choosing a clear, descriptive title that clients will instantly understand, such as ’30-Minute Discovery Call’ or ‘Full Website Audit’. Next, you will set the exact Duration of the appointment in minutes. It is important to be accurate here so the plugin knows exactly how much time to block off on your calendar to prevent double-booking. Next, you need to set the Location. If you meet clients virtually, you can click ‘Add Location Option’, select ‘Custom Link’, and paste your Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams URL right here. Don’t worry about doing timezone math. The booking calendar will automatically display your availability in your client’s local timezone. If you have a physical office, you can enter your street address instead. Below that, you can set the Price and add a Description. I always use the description area to be very clear about my payment terms. For example, if I am only charging a small fee upfront, I make sure to state that it is a ‘Non-refundable Deposit’ so there are

Conferences are hectic, but experts say taking breaks is key for success. Pausing helps recharge, absorb info, and connect meaningfully with others. Balance is everything!