I went to the WordCamp Europe 2026 schedule the way I do every year, looking for a reason to be there. Every workshop, every keynote, every ten-minute lightning slot. I scrolled it twice.

There was nothing there for me.

To make sure I wasn’t being unfair, I had AI read every session summary on the site — all fifty — and pull out what each one was about, who it was pitched at, and at what depth. I wanted to read the whole room before I called it.

I wasn’t being unfair. Nothing for the work I do. Nothing for the conversations I want to be in. And — as I’ll get to — nothing for the platform’s user base, the people I love WordPress because of.

A note on whose chair this is written from. I don’t make my living selling WordPress services. I’m not an agency owner, a hosting exec, a plugin shop, or a core committer. I’m a vibe coder — I can’t hand-code. I build projects for fun, mostly powered by AI, on top of WordPress because I love WordPress. That’s the lens. Every word that follows comes from that love. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t be writing this — I’d just be quietly not buying a ticket, the way more and more people are.

I want WordPress to mean something. I want WordCamps to mean something. I want this platform to bend the next decade of the open web rather than watch the bending happen somewhere else. This isn’t a jab at people working hard to put on a conference. It’s the opposite. People who don’t care don’t bother — they stop showing up quietly, the schedule gets more obscure to itself, and eventually nobody’s left to disappoint. I’d rather say something while it can be fixed.

It’s a strange thing to have to say about software that runs almost half the internet. WordPress doesn’t have a niche audience problem. It has the opposite of one. Throw a rock at random websites and you’ll hit a WordPress site before you hit a parked car. And yet the flagship European gathering of the WordPress world reads like a graduate seminar on a software project that nobody at the seminar uses to do their job.

The speakers are sharp. The topics are real. The summaries are written by people who clearly care. The problem is structural: WordCamps aren’t for the people who use WordPress. They’re for the people who build it, sell it, and make their living from inside its economy. Those have never been the same group, and every year the gap grows while the schedule pretends nothing is happening.

The schedule is a mirror

Look at the categories. A deep API workshop on HTML parsing. A two-and-a-half-hour deep dive on caching layers inside a commerce plugin. A workshop on getting your plugin into the directory. Panels on the future of WordPress core. Talks on hardening plugins, scaling sites on tiny servers, headless API patterns, query class internals. Sessions on positioning your SaaS, finding product-market fit, running a contributor-friendly agency, turning open-source participation into culture.

Now picture the people on the other side of that work — the people I love WordPress because of. The dentist whose nephew set up his site in 2019. The food blogger who switched from Squarespace last year. The small-town newspaper editor who started publishing on WordPress five years ago and never looked back. The wedding photographer with a $40 ThemeForest theme that hasn’t been updated since the pandemic. The nonprofit director running a donation form she doesn’t understand. The freelance illustrator. The high school robotics club. The Polish bakery whose hours are wrong because nobody knows how to log into the back end.

These are the people running 43% of the web. Not contributors. Not agency owners. Not core engineers. Not plugin authors. Them. They are why I love this thing. They are the only reason the number is as big as it is.

None of them are at this conference. Not because tickets are expensive — they aren’t, by tech-conference standards. They’re not there because the schedule has nothing to say to them. No talk titled “How my small bakery actually uses WordPress and what I wish I knew.” No track for site owners. The closest thing to a beginner session — a ten-minute lightning slot on why WordPress feels overwhelming for newcomers — sits between a forty-five-minute dive into engineering business value through the Business Model Canvas and a workshop on cache invalidation. That’s the welcome mat for the people I love about this project.

The AI tell

For evidence that the schedule has been captured by a professional class, look at the AI talks. Roughly ten of them. Build an AI-powered plugin. Build an AI workflow on top of the WordPress API. Configure structured data so AI bots cite your content. Engineer university AI tutors. Wire up AI to your marketing operations. Use AI to fight spam. Use AI to audit themes.

Now notice what isn’t there. No talk for the small business owner asking the only AI question that matters to them: why is my traffic dying, and should I even bother having a website anymore? No talk on what AI search means for a restaurant whose Google Business profile is now its real homepage. No talk on what the photographer should do when image search has been replaced by a generated answer. No talk on how a small publisher should think about being scraped, cited, or commodified by a model. No talk for the freelancer wondering whether the contact form on her site was quietly replaced by a customer who never visits sites anymore.

These are the AI talks I’d love to see. They’re the talks the people I love about WordPress are quietly desperate for — and none of them got booked. Every AI talk on the schedule assumes you’re a builder. Every AI talk frames the question as how do I build something with this, not what does this mean for the website I already have. That’s the gap between the WordPress economy and the WordPress audience. The conference picked one. The other didn’t get to apply.

And it isn’t even for builders like me

Here’s the part that hurts most, because I am one. I love AI. I build for fun — I’m not selling anything, I’m not running an agency, I’m just someone who likes making things on top of WordPress because the platform makes it possible. By every box on the AI-builder side of the room, this schedule should be for me. And it still isn’t.

The AI talks aren’t for builders. They’re for introductory builders. Build your first AI plugin. A few-minute intro to a new permissions API. An AI-agent workshop wrapped around an audit script. A wake-up call on AI search aimed at people who, if they’re at this conference at all, were awake two years ago. Every AI title reads like something I knew in 2024.

The easy misread is “he wants harder engineering talks.” I don’t. I’m a vibe coder. I’m not sitting through a deep dive on how the model works under the hood, or how to harden it against prompt attacks, or how the data plumbing for a smart search assistant fits together, and most of the room wouldn’t either. That isn’t the frontier I’m missing.

The frontier I’m missing — the frontier I’d love a whole track on — is what building looks like now. What it’s like to ship a real product in 2026 with AI in the loop the whole way through. What WordPress development looks like when anyone with an idea and a Claude tab can stand up a working prototype in an afternoon — and what that does to every “we charge fifteen thousand dollars for a five-page brochure site” line item the WordPress agency economy is built on. The new categories of product that opened up in the last eighteen months and weren’t imaginable before. The shape of the next three years.

Where’s the talk from someone who shipped a real thing on WordPress in a weekend with AI coding tools and is willing to be honest about what worked, what didn’t, and what it means? Where’s the Playground + AI talk — the most interesting pairing WordPress has, with Playground sessions over here, AI sessions over there, and nobody connecting them? Where’s the talk on what it means that the people who used to need an agency don’t anymore, and what those agencies should do instead?

Where’s the talk that says out loud what every honest agency owner already knows in their stomach — that AI is going to eat the page-builder business, eat templated SEO, eat the “build me a marketing site” request-for-proposal, and that the next three years of WordPress agency revenue will look nothing like the last three?

None of it is on the schedule. The schedule treats AI as a feature you bolt onto a plugin. It is not. It’s the thing reorganising the web around itself, and the CMS I love now has to compete with it for relevance.

So when I say there’s nothing on this schedule for me, I don’t mean I’m too senior. I mean it’s calibrated for an attendee who doesn’t exist anymore — a hypothetical median builder just hearing about AI, who hasn’t shipped anything with it, curious in a 2023 way. That builder skilled up or moved on. The conference is still pitching to her ghost.

Same root cause as the user-side failure: a speaker-selection loop that picks last year’s safe topics, taught by last year’s safe speakers, in front of a room that’s already moved past it.

How this happens

The organisers aren’t doing this on purpose. I want to be clear about that — I’m not writing this to blame anyone. WordCamps end up here because of a feedback loop that’s run, untouched, for fifteen years.

The people who organise WordCamps are contributors. The people who submit talks are mostly contributors and people inside the WordPress economy. The selection committee reads those submissions through the contributor lens. The talks that get picked are the ones that resonate with people who already attend WordCamps. Which means next year’s WordCamp looks like last year’s. Which means the only people who’d think to submit a talk are people who already attend. Which means new voices get filtered out before they pick up a pen.

The result: a conference circuit that has optimised itself away from its own user base. Every year the schedule gets denser, more technical, more inside-baseball — not because users got more technical, but because the selection process narrowed. The speaker pool isn’t representative of WordPress users. It’s representative of the WordPress professional class, who’ve learned exactly how to write a talk title that gets past the selection committee. That’s a craft. It’s also a closed loop.

The actual users — the bakery, the dentist, the photographer, the nonprofit, the people I love WordPress because of — never apply. Why would they? They don’t see themselves in five years of past schedules. They’d feel like intruders. They’d correctly read the room and assume the room isn’t for them. So the room stays the way it is.

The WordCamp I’d love to go to

The fix isn’t complicated. It’s just unfashionable, because it would require current attendees to share the stage with people they don’t consider peers.

The WordCamp I’d love to go to would reserve at least forty percent of speaking slots for people who don’t work in the WordPress economy. Not “users who later became contributors.” Actual users. The restaurant owner. The therapist with a Calendly integration. The school administrator. The wedding photographer. The newsletter writer. The hobbyist running a fan site. Their talks would be unpolished. Some would be bad. The good ones would change the conversation more than any HTML API workshop ever will.

It would organise tracks by audience, not by topic — a small-business track, a creator track, a nonprofit track, a journalism track, an educator track — instead of slicing everything by which part of the codebase it touches. It would treat “beginner” as a flagship track, not a lightning-talk afterthought. Photography conferences have beginner tracks. Cooking conferences have beginner tracks. Music software conferences have beginner tracks. WordCamps have a ten-minute slot at 14:10 on day two.

It would invite speakers from outside the bubble — designers who use WordPress and hate parts of it, marketers making it work alongside three other tools, journalists who chose it over Substack and want to explain why, agency clients who could tell the room what the WordPress experience is like from the buying side. It would deliberately under-invite the same speakers who appear every year. It would treat speaker selection as a recruiting problem, not a filtering problem — the goal being to bring new voices in, not to weed unfamiliar ones out.

And it would stop relying on one closing keynote to do the work an entire schedule should do. Matt has been the most visible champion of the open web in our industry for two decades — the schedule around him should amplify that argument across every track, not lean on him to deliver it once and call it done.

That’s the WordCamp I’d buy a ticket to before the call for talks even closed. That’s the WordCamp I’d fly across the continent for. That’s the WordCamp I love.

The next one could be the one I love

The schedule is the argument. Every year it makes itself. Every year the same people approve it. Every year the people it isn’t for shrug and don’t come, the people it is for nod and call it a great event, and the gap between the conference and the platform’s user base grows quietly wider.

WordPress’s strength has never been the contributor base. It’s been the unreasonable diversity of who showed up to publish on it. Forty-three percent of the web isn’t held together by core committers. It’s held together by people who learned just enough WordPress to do the one thing they came to do. They are the platform. They deserve a conference. The version of WordPress I love is the one held together by them.

This 2026 one isn’t that conference. And if the people who organise these events don’t change it on purpose, it never will be — because nothing in the current loop will produce a different result.

WordCamp Europe 2026 is locked. The schedule is set, the speakers booked, the rooms reserved. June will happen the way June will happen, and this essay won’t change a single thing about it. I’m not pretending otherwise.

The next one isn’t locked. The 2027 call for talks hasn’t opened. The selection committee hasn’t been formed. The decisions about what the next WordCamp is for — and who it’s for — are still entirely in the room’s hands. If the organisers change it on purpose, the next WordCamp gets to be the one that did. If they don’t, this same essay writes itself again next year, and the year after, until eventually nobody bothers because nobody’s left to disappoint.

I love WordPress. I’d love to love WordCamp again. I’d love to walk into a room and find a session that speaks to the people I love this project because of, and find another session that speaks to the way builders like me actually build now, and find a third session that I didn’t even know I needed until I sat down. I’d love to come back here in two years and admit I was wrong about WordCamp Europe 2026 — because the one that came after it proved me wrong.

Change it on purpose. I’d love nothing more than the next WordCamp being the one that finally was for me. For us. For everyone the platform forgot it was for.