Castles, Code and Community: WordCamp Europe 2026

The team has returned from WordCamp Europe 2026, which took place in the historic city of Kraków, Poland. From exploring the city’s landmarks and underground salt mines to immersing ourselves in sessions, workshops and conversations with the wider WordPress community, here’s our recap of the highlights from this year’s event.

What is WordCamp Europe?

One of the largest WordPress events in the world, WordCamp Europe brings together developers, designers, agencies, content creators, business owners and contributors from across the global WordPress community.

This year’s event in Kraków showed just how active and wide-reaching that community is, with 2,458 tickets sold and attendees from 81 countries. The programme included more than 60 speakers, 8 workshops and a busy Contributor Day, where 778 participants worked across 23 Make teams, supported by 35 table leads.

For us, WordCamp Europe is a great opportunity to learn what is happening across the wider WordPress ecosystem, meet the people behind the tools we use every day and bring fresh ideas back into our client work.

Highlights from WordCamp Europe 2026

WordPress at CERN

The keynote was delivered by Joachim Valdemar Yde, CERN’s Web Manager, and Francisco Borges Aurindo Barros, who leads CERN’s WordPress infrastructure. Titled Two Worlds Collide: WordPress at CERN, it explored how CERN, the birthplace of the World Wide Web, is now using WordPress at scale across its organisation.

The talk covered CERN’s move from a complex and fragmented web estate to a more streamlined WordPress platform, including governance, infrastructure, security, migration and content ownership. It was a powerful reminder of how flexible and robust WordPress can be when applied thoughtfully, even in highly technical environments with large-scale requirements.

Human judgement in an AI world

Tammie Lister’s talk, Human in the loop means something, explored how AI should support people rather than push them out of the process. She challenged the idea that adding a human approval step is enough, arguing that meaningful collaboration means people need to be able to understand, question and step into AI systems at any point.

The talk was a useful reminder that trust is not created by labels or checkboxes, but by transparent, accountable systems that allow humans to bring judgement, context and creativity, while AI handles scale, speed and pattern recognition.

Lightning talk highlights

A few of the lightning talks also stood out to the team, including Smarter plugin permissions with the Abilities API by Anukasha Singh and Block bindings for all! by Robert O’Rourke.

Anukasha’s session explored how the Abilities API could help make AI-powered WordPress integrations safer, with better scoping, agent-specific permissions and audit trails for actions taken through tools such as MCP.

Rob’s talk, despite a few technical difficulties, was a useful introduction to block bindings and their potential for connecting block attributes to post meta, dynamic data and future content modelling in WordPress.

Hands-on with AI in WordPress

Jonathan Bossenger’s workshop, Build your first AI-powered WordPress plugin, was one of the sessions that sparked the most interest for our team. The practical workshop explored how AI can be integrated directly into WordPress using emerging tools such as the Abilities API, MCP adapter and AI client. It also gave us the chance to build working AI-powered functionality within WordPress during the session.

Since then, we have already started discussing practical use cases for client websites, from improving content workflows and streamlining admin tasks to creating smarter integrations and automation. It feels like an exciting time to explore what AI can add to WordPress projects when it is applied thoughtfully.

Side events and community gatherings

As well as the main conference, we attended a few side events taking place around WordCamp Europe, including Automattic Connect, the Woo Community Meetup and the official after party.

Automattic Connect was a relaxed evening reception where we had the chance to speak with people from across the Automattic ecosystem, as well as other WordPress VIP accredited agencies.

We also joined the Woo Community Meetup, held on a floating restaurant on the river, which was a brilliant setting for catching up with familiar faces, meeting new people and having conversations with others in the WooCommerce community.

The official after party at Forty Kleparz was a memorable way to round off the event, with a great venue, plenty of space to chat, live music and some questionable karaoke. These events are always a great part of the WordCamp experience, giving the community more time to connect beyond the main conference.

Exploring Kraków

Of course, it would have been a shame to visit Kraków without seeing a little of the city while we were there.

By chance, our visit coincided with the 25th anniversary of the annual Wawel Dragon celebrations, one of Kraków’s most colourful events. Celebrating the legend of the Wawel Dragon, now one of the city’s best-known symbols, the parade draws thousands of people to the river to watch huge illuminated dragons float past, accompanied by laser displays, fireworks and family events.

We took a walking tour of Kraków’s Old Town and Wawel Castle, which gave us a great introduction to the city. Starting at Wawel Royal Castle, the route took us through some of Kraków’s historic streets and landmarks before reaching Rynek Główny, the city’s impressive main square. From there, we continued through the Old Town, taking in more of the city’s architecture and history along the way.

Away from the centre, some of the team took the opportunity to explore more of Kraków’s history, architecture and culture. One of the standout trips was to the Wieliczka Salt Mine, a UNESCO World Heritage Site just outside the city, with its vast network of tunnels, underground chambers and carved salt sculptures.

Until next time, WordCamp Europe

Between the conference sessions, community events and a little time spent exploring Kraków, WordCamp Europe 2026 gave us plenty to take away, both professionally and personally.

It was a brilliant reminder of why we continue to value the WordPress community. The platform keeps evolving, but it is the people behind it, the contributors, organisers, speakers, sponsors, agencies, developers, designers and users, who make events like this so worthwhile.

We have come away with new ideas, fresh inspiration and plenty to explore further, particularly around AI, accessibility, content workflows and the future of WordPress development.

Next year, WordCamp Europe heads to Málaga, Spain, which feels especially fitting with Laura’s home country playing host. We are already looking forward to seeing where the community takes things next.