WordPress.org blog: What Happened at WordCamp Europe 2026
WordCamp Europe, the biggest WordPress conference in Europe, spent the first week of June in Kraków. The 2026 edition of this event filled the ICE Kraków Congress Centre from June 4 to 6, drawing 2,458 ticket holders from 81 countries to the south of Poland. Close to a quarter of them were attending their first WordCamp Europe. The city made it easy to settle in. Every attendee’s badge carried a transport hologram good for unlimited trams and buses. The Main Market Square, the largest in Europe, sat a short ride away, and the local food ran the gamut from pierogi to żurek soup to obwarzanek pretzels sold off the street. Kraków is beautiful, with history everywhere.– Sebastian Miśniakiewicz, local team lead The program kept pace with the setting. Across multiple tracks, the schedule held 49 talks and eight hands-on workshops, grouped into themes that ran from core development and AI to business and the open web. Around them sat a full Contributor Day, a sponsor area, side events, on-site childcare, and an after-party the local team stretched to eight hours. Contributor Day Opens the Week As it does every year, the event began the day before the talks. Contributors filled the venue for Contributor Day, a working session where people work together to improve WordPress itself rather than watch a presentation about it. The morning started with registration and a welcome, the room split into teams, and a group photo broke up the work around midday. The afternoon ran a second working block before each team gathered to share what it had done. The range of tables is the clearest picture of how wide the project has become. Newcomers could sit down with Polyglots to translate WordPress into their own language, with Documentation to fix the pages people reach when they get stuck, or with Support to answer questions in the forums. More technical tables covered Core, Performance, Testing, Themes, and the Plugins team, whose reviewers screen every plugin submitted to the directory. First-timers were not left to find their own way. The day was built around onboarding tables, named table leads, and mentors, with an open invitation for experienced contributors to adopt a newcomer and walk them through their first patch, string, or ticket. People who could not travel to Kraków were welcomed to join remotely through the #contributor-day channel in the Make WordPress Slack, so distance was not a reason to sit the day out. The Birthplace of the Web It was fitting that the opening keynote came from CERN. The European Laboratory for Particle Physics, on the French-Swiss border outside Geneva, is where the World Wide Web was invented more than 30 years ago, and Joachim Valdemar Yde, who has managed CERN’s web team since 2021, came to explain why the laboratory had chosen WordPress to carry its web presence forward. Yde and Francisco Borges Aurindo Barros, who leads CERN’s WordPress infrastructure, framed the move as a chance to give a web presence built up over three decades a shared, modern foundation. After evaluating several leading content management systems against CERN’s needs, WordPress came out on top. Barros walked through what they had built. The guiding idea is that people at CERN focus on their content while the web team looks after the platform underneath. A self-service portal lets anyone request a site in a few clicks. Behind it, a shared distribution supplies a common theme and a set of approved, security-hardened plugins, and an in-house tool provisions each new site on Kubernetes in about a minute. In its first year, the platform has already set up hundreds of sites. Moving years of existing content onto the new platform is the other half of the work, and the team automated it: a single command lifts each site’s pages, headings, and images and rebuilds them as Gutenberg blocks, with no downtime. They plan to open source the tool. Then Yde delivered the line that the room had been waiting for. As of today, our main flagship website, home.cern, is now served on WordPress. It’s been automatically migrated, and it’s live. – Joachim Valdemar Yde, Web Manager, CERN The rollout is on track to wrap up over the coming months, and early impressions, Yde said, have been overwhelmingly positive, with easy wins in responsiveness and accessibility. For those at the event, the keynote pointed the room toward a later talk by CERN’s Akanksha Chatterjee on building and maintaining the laboratory’s engineering websites on the same service. There is a neat symmetry to it. The institution that published the world’s first website now runs on the software that powers more than 40% of today’s web, licensed under the GPL and maintained by the people in the room. WordPress 7.0 and AI WordPress 7.0 was a throughline of the conference. Several sessions placed the release at the center, framing it less as a routine update than as a change in what the software is, and in what it makes possible for the people who build with it. The anchor for that conversation was a panel called “Inside WordPress 7.0.” It gathered contributors who worked on the release, among them Juan Manuel Garrido, Adam Silverstein, Benjamin Zekavica, Sarah Norris, and Milana Cap. It was framed around more than a feature list, setting out to cover how a release of this size actually comes together: the contribution workflows, the coordination, and the human aspects of shipping software in the open. What gives this release its weight is the work moving into WordPress’s core: a native AI client, a new Abilities API that lets plugins declare what they can do in a way other tools can discover, and a Connectors screen for wiring up providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google Gemini. The argument running through the AI sessions was that this belongs to everyone who builds on WordPress, not only to developers shipping their own integrations. Speakers got specific about how to put that to work. Anukasha Singh focused on how the
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