WordCamp Europe 2026 opens with Contributor Day on June 4, ahead of two full conference days at the ICE Kraków Congress Centre in Poland — anchored by a CERN keynote on migrating more than 800 websites onto a custom WordPress platform, and a closing address from Matt Mullenweg on the open web.
The event opens with Contributor Day on June 4, where community members work on WordPress core, documentation, accessibility, and other open-source projects. Two full conference days follow, anchored by two keynotes.
The opening keynote comes from Joachim Valdemar Yde and Francisco Borges Aurindo Barros of CERN — the European particle physics research centre. Their session, “Two Worlds Collide: WordPress at CERN,” covers the governance, infrastructure, and migration decisions behind the deployment, detailed below. Matt Mullenweg closes the event with a keynote on the open web and the direction of the WordPress project.
- “Two Worlds Collide: WordPress at CERN” — Joachim Valdemar Yde & Francisco Borges Aurindo Barros
- Details how CERN is migrating more than 800 websites onto a custom WordPress platform, covering governance, infrastructure, and migration decisions.
- “Inside WordPress 7.0” — Panel discussion
- Contributors come together to discuss the upcoming WordPress 7.0 release.
- Agentic AI Workflows — Vito Peleg
- Explores how AI executes multi-step tasks rather than just responding to one-off prompts.
- AI-Native Search — Emma Young
- Argues that AI-native search now affects every department, not just marketing.
Other sessions cover the new Abilities API — a permissions system that gives plugins finer-grained control over user capabilities — headless WordPress (decoupled architectures where WordPress serves content via its REST API to a separate frontend), headless API security, and a workshop for building developer portfolios with Full Site Editing.
AI takes up the largest single block of dedicated sessions, including the two talks detailed above. Monika Dimitrova’s session focuses on applying AI in small businesses without diluting brand identity.
Search and SEO sessions address how AI-generated answers and new discovery platforms are changing visibility for publishers, including the AI-native search talk above. Kacper Bartoszak, Pam Aungst Cronin, and Alex Moss will examine where SEO is headed next.
Business sessions cover product-market fit, connecting technical decisions to measurable outcomes, and positioning strategy for WordPress products and services. The community and education track includes sessions on rethinking how people learn WordPress and the psychology of working in open source.
Security, accessibility, content strategy, and documentation complete the schedule. Accessibility sessions focus on integrating inclusive design into everyday decisions rather than treating it as a separate audit step.
Tickets and the full schedule are available at europe.wordcamp.org/2026. The full session lineup is in the WordPress.org News announcement.
