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 Abilities API can make plugin permissions cleaner and safer than the capability checks developers have leaned on for years.
• In a workshop, Vito Peleg set out to take builders from one-off prompts toward a tool-using workflow that audits a live site and files structured tickets.
• Alain Schlesser, a WP-CLI maintainer who has worked on structured data and the AI-native web, turned to a fast-growing opportunity. AI assistants and search now send real traffic to the open web, with more than a billion referral visits logged by the middle of 2025. His session framed WordPress as well-placed to earn that attention, with a practical checklist for getting a site ready to be found, read, and cited.

People stayed at the center of the conversation, too. Tammie Lister, in a talk called “Human in the loop means something,” framed the phrase as a real commitment rather than a checkbox. Humans and AI are each good at different things, and the products worth building let each do what it does best.

Development and Craft

The development sessions were where the craft lived. Dennis Snell, who co-wrote the HTML API and designed the block parser, devoted a deep-dive workshop to that API. Peter Wilson, a long-time Core committer on the Performance team, focused on how the WP_Query class has been made faster through better caching, and how site builders can take advantage of that at scale.

Scaling got a hands-on session of its own. One talk set out to see how far a WordPress site can run on a twelve-dollar virtual server, profiling it under load in Grafana and tuning away the bottlenecks, with a GitHub repository so attendees could follow along at home. Fellyph Cintra focused on the latest in WordPress Playground, the browser-based tooling and architectural changes that the project credits with a real speed-up.

Jessica Lyschik, a Core contributor and former default-theme co-lead, set out to make the case that accessibility-ready requirements are far easier to meet than most theme developers assume, drawing on real reviews of both block and classic themes.

Two members of the Plugins team, David Perez and Fran Torres, framed their session as a practical clinic. Between them, they have reviewed more than 25,000 plugins, and they set out to name the common, avoidable issues that keep good plugins stuck in the review queue. For a first-time author, that is the difference between an afternoon and a month of waiting.

The Business of WordPress and the Open Web

The business and community sessions pulled the lens back to people, with a refreshingly unsentimental view of running a WordPress business. Debbie Levitt built her talk around a model for finding product-market fit at three levels at once, on the premise that teams celebrate one good metric and then wonder months later where their users went. Vassilena Valchanova took on a quieter problem: being good at the work is not the same as anyone knowing you are.

There was a local thread here as well. Irfani Silviana, a full-stack developer at a Kraków-based agency, framed the Business Model Canvas as a translation layer that moves developers from shipping features to engineering business value, a fitting talk to give in her own city.

The web’s standards, the argument goes, remain as open as the day Tim Berners-Lee created them at CERN.

That idea carried through the rest of the community sessions.

• David Snead, an attorney who works with internet infrastructure providers, set out to explain how hosts, registrars, and registries coordinate against abuse through shared, real-time intelligence, on the logic that a threat to one WordPress host is a threat to all of them.
• Marcel Bootsman shared a practical playbook for how companies and individuals can support open source sustainably and look after the people who keep it going.
• Karin Christen set out to describe how her Swiss agency turned Five for the Future from a good intention into a standing team habit through internal contributor days.

Running alongside the talks, the hands-on workshops were a chance to build something on the spot. In one, Ryan Welcher set out to build a touch-enabled gallery slider with the Interactivity API, while another centered on Full Site Editing, with a working portfolio theme attendees could reuse on their next client project. These were laptop-open, leave-with-working-code sessions.

Closing Fireside Chat

The closing session opened with a warm gesture from Kraków University of Technology. Representatives took the stage to thank the organizers and the community and to present Mary Hubbard, the Executive Director of WordPress, with a gift from their faculty of informatics and mathematics. They described what the university and the WordCamp community share: a love of learning and sharing knowledge, and an openness to new ideas, skills, and connections.

Hubbard used the moment to share some news. Starting in October, the university will open a WordPress-specific course, which she called a trail-blazing event for Poland and for WordPress. Earlier that day, the program’s first cohort, around 20 students, had shown what they built, part of the WordPress Campus Connect and WordPress Credits education work.

Hubbard then turned the stage into a conversation, inviting Matías Ventura, the lead of the Gutenberg project, and Rich Tabor, a WordPress designer and developer, to talk through where WordPress is heading and how AI fits in. WordPress 7.0 had just launched with Ventura as its release lead, and he asked everyone who had contributed to it to stand for a round of applause.

Much of the chat explored the balance between building WordPress with AI, and building with AI on WordPress, without losing the human part. Ventura noted that WordPress’s long investment in its design system is paying off now that you can ask an AI to extend a menu or a control, and it reaches for the right components. He pointed to older primitives gaining new value, like WP-CLI, which AI models use fluently, and to Studio Code, an open source, agent-based coding tool the team has been building for WordPress. Tabor showed how he now ships many small editor improvements by talking to an agent instead of typing code, and Ventura demoed desktop mode and open-canvas experiments that reimagine the admin.

On open source and AI, Hubbard argued that open source is why WordPress has thrived, that the same values should shape AI, and that the community should be far more vocal about it. As she put it, “We should be talking about it, and we should be much louder about it.”

Audience questions pushed on multilingual support, unsticking long-stalled tickets, and reaching a younger, more diverse community. On that last point, Hubbard came back to education, pointing to a US pilot of an AI literacy micro-credential that uses WordPress as the playground, and made the case for it:

I think that focusing in on younger generations, and bringing them into the project in a healthy way, with the dynamic of education as well as mentorship, and how we can understand and learn from them, as well as mentor them and adopt them as contributors, is very important.

– Mary Hubbard, WordPress Executive Director

Beyond the Talks

WordCamp is also about the corridor outside the talks, and Kraków gave people reason to roam. Between sessions, attendees moved through the sponsor area for product demos and conversations that often carried on over lunch.

The after-party was the not-so-subtle flourish of a local team that doubled the usual length to eight hours, with Polish food and dragon-and-floral swag that nodded to the Wawel Dragon of Kraków legend. The nearby artistic Kazimierz district kept the evening going, and the trams, as one organizer had promised, were still running reliably afterward.

What Comes Next

WordCamps run on people, and 2026 was no different. The organizing teams, the speakers, the sponsors who funded the venue and the meals, the local crew who sorted trams and pierogi, and the contributors who arrived a day early to work on the project all built this WCEU together. The people watching the livestream from outside Kraków were part of it as well.

For anyone whose appetite was only sharpened by three days in Poland, the calendar already has the next stop. WordCamp US 2026 (Phoenix, USA) runs August 16 to 19, with its own Contributor Day opening the week.

WordCamp Europe will return next year (May 27-29, 2027) in Málaga, Spain.

Photography by the WCEU 2026 photography team. See the full galleries on Flickr.

One of the things we’ve always striven to do as the developers of WordPress is to work harder so you don’t have to; we take technology that’s complex or inaccessible and make it available to everyone, running in as many environments as possible. It’s the Open Source way.

Just last December there was a step-change in coding ability that rocked many developers, and since April’s reveal of Mythos, security activity has kicked into high gear. A few days ago, Chrome shipped a release with 429 security fixes! The threats and opportunities of these new capabilities inspired us to kick off an initiative we call Protect The Shire (hat tip J. R. R. Tolkien) with the aim of using our best minds and the infrastructure of WordPress.org to make all code in our directories and repositories as secure as possible.

Much of this work was and will remain behind the scenes, and we hope its success is defined mostly by what doesn’t happen. However, while we reckon with our newfound powers, we need to make space for review.

To Update or Not

WordPress core updates go through multiple people and layers of review before they go out, a process we’ve polished to a high art in the 18 years since we introduced one-click upgrades in 2.7 “Coltrane.”

Core is solid, and I’m so proud that over 50% of all WordPress sites have upgraded to 7.0 within two weeks! That’s the result of an unimaginable amount of work across thousands of hosts, developers, and teams across WordPress.org. We’ve pushed hard to make upgrades happen automagically, and as fast as possible.

We’re in a liminal period now, and I believe 2026 will be a year of tension between two approaches: updating as quickly as possible to stay secure, and holding back on updating to stay secure.

We’ve seen clever and dangerous supply chain attacks across the npm, PyPI, GitHub, and RubyGems ecosystems, and we even had our own mini-version with the Essential Plugins debacle, where good plugins were unknowingly sold to a new author who had malicious intent.

How to balance security updates and securing updates?

Mirkwood or the Wild West?

Everyone knows the fun of WordPress is in its 78k+ plugins and themes. We have a rigorous, human-powered review process for theme and plugin submissions, but once you’re published in the directory, you’re on your own. Our update system currently distributes every plugin and theme release as soon as a developer presses the button. That’s what keeps the directory as robust as WordPress itself. There were over 3,000 commits to the plugin repository yesterday! 

For now, each new plugin release will wait up to 24 hours before being distributed through auto-updates. This will give everyone, including a new Wapuu we call Gandalf, a chance to review changes.

I expect 24 hours could be reduced to minutes as the process evolves, but we’ll err on the side of caution while AI models are advancing so rapidly.

Our plugin review team seems superhuman, but still needs to sleep. But bots don’t, and a depth of review that seemed unimaginable before is now a matter of time and tokens.

The security capabilities of AI are going to make the world weird and take a lot of our focus in the next few months, but there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.

Our Shire Is Special

There’s no shortage of ways to find, install, and update plugins and themes for WordPress. For those who choose WordPress.org, though, we want to make sure that it feels safe and secure. That means staying strict about some things—like guidelines and Open Source licenses—while also remaining flexible enough to allow solo hackers, community projects, and for-profit commercial plugins and themes to thrive in our ecosystem.

GitHub stars may get the hype, but if you add up all the numbers in our plugin directory, it’s over 400M installs. There are 69 plugins, many from solo devs, installed on over a million sites each! Now we need to learn from the best parts of GitHub and make that available to every developer on WordPress.org.

Just because WordPress plugins have a reputation for vulnerabilities is no reason not to aim for the same security and stability we’ve achieved in core. We’ve done the impossible a few times already in our journey from a b2/cafelog fork to where we are today. 

Freedom and security are not zero-sum. With Open Source, we can show how security comes from transparency, not obscurity. Collaboration over competition. What we accomplish when we come together is nothing short of incredible. Success always attracts bad actors, but we grow stronger through every adversity.

The scale of WordPress can make some challenges seem too big to tackle, but given time, there is no problem that’s insurmountable. I’m reminded of the story behind the title of Anne Lamott’s book Bird by Bird:

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

More to come, stay tuned. I wish everyone in Kraków at WordCamp Europe the best and hope to see you soon!

Last week, we shipped WordPress 7 to the world. In seven days, 46% of all WordPresses, tens of millions across countless different hosting environments, are already on 7.0, auto-updated with no breakage. From a Raspberry Pi to the most secure sites in the world, like WhiteHouse.gov. Sit with that for a minute when you think of all the resources and all the projects that have had security problems in the past few weeks. No supply chain attacks, no security problems, just a stable, secure infrastructure doing its job invisibly to power a huge portion of the open internet.

I’m really proud of the capability and security of WordPress, and we should celebrate that. That accomplishment represents the work of thousands and thousands of people coming together to make the web a better place. Also, an iceberg of what is going on behind the scenes.

However, the release was not what I hoped it would be because so much time from key people was taken away by WP Engine’s attacks.

Silver Lake, in its immense 100B+ power, summoned a shoggoth in Quinn Emanuel that has been paperclip-maximizing legal torture that is not just going after Automattic and WordPress.org and me personally, but this Golem Jagannath is now trying to dissolve the WordPress Foundation itself, a non-profit with no employees or payroll that supports WordCamps and Open Source education around the world.

If you know anyone at Silver Lake, Quinn Emanuel, or WP Engine in that order, please beg, plead with them to stop the violence. End this internecine warfare that is threatening to destroy one of the last stalwarts of the Open Web.

It’s not fun and games anymore, not just business. This is having a real impact on people’s lives.

It took every ounce of will in my body, and I am grateful to thousands of hours of meditation, to not explode in rage when asked about pineapple on pizza and debating the meaning of Jean Baudrillard and “bastardized simalcra” when miles away, my closest friend is in a hospital bed waiting for a heart transplant.

I have colleagues LITERALLY DYING I can’t be with because Silver Lake / Quinn Emanuel / WP Engine shoggoth is trying to make it seem like I am hiding or destroying evidence because we rotate logs on wordpress.org or I have disappearing chats on Signal with romantic partners. I don’t curse, but this is so f-ed up I don’t know what to say.

If you don’t know anyone at these entities, please pray, meditate, and call on whatever forces or divine interventions you can to bring this to an end.

I reached out multiple times to resolve this with open arms; I’ve extended every olive branch; and I’ve even said positive things about Silver Lake and WP Engine in the press, trying to bring this to a close. Heather Brunner would not even come into the same room with me.

All of this from a stupid presentation I gave at WordCamp US 2024 about how private equity can hollow out high-trust-based Open Source communities that in the past 19 months has only gotten 16k views on YouTube.  

Silver Lake, you have already extracted all your pounds of flesh. I missed my Mom’s knee surgery. If you wanted me to suffer for my sins, I have, and probably deeper than you will ever know. WordPress and WordPress.org, and yes, even my flawed leadership, are at the heart of what has made WP Engine successful so far. You have so much money and power, you just got TikTok, the Trump administration loves you, you don’t need to control and take over WordPress, too. If you win, you destroy it, and then what? Please have mercy and stop trying to ruin people’s lives. Let’s move on.

June 4-6, 2026 | ICE Kraków Congress Centre, Kraków, Poland

WordCamp Europe 2026 will bring the WordPress community together in Kraków, Poland, from June 4–6 for Contributor Day, two conference days, and a program shaped by the ideas, tools, and people moving WordPress forward. This year’s schedule includes two official keynotes, hands-on workshops, panels, and sessions across development, accessibility, artificial intelligence, content, search, business, education, security, and community.

The program offers a broad view of how WordPress is used today: as publishing software, a framework for building at scale, a tool for business growth, and a global open source project shaped by contributors around the world. Whether you build with WordPress, write for the web, support clients, teach new learners, or contribute to the project, WordCamp Europe offers a chance to learn from practical examples and connect them to the platform’s future.

Keynotes at WordCamp Europe 2026

The keynote sessions at WordCamp Europe 2026 will give attendees two ways to look at WordPress today: through a large-scale institutional adoption story and through a broader closing reflection on where the project is headed. These sessions anchor the program while connecting many of the themes that appear throughout the conference, from infrastructure and governance to contribution, innovation, and the future of the web.

Joachim Valdemar Yde and Francisco Borges Aurindo Barros will share how CERN is adopting WordPress as its future content management system. Their keynote will explore the governance, infrastructure, and migration work behind moving more than 800 websites onto a customized WordPress Service, offering a look at WordPress on an institutional scale.

Ma.tt Mullenweg will close WordCamp Europe 2026 with a broader look at WordPress, the open web, and the ideas shaping what comes next. As the event’s final keynote, this session will bring together many of the conversations happening across Contributor Day, sessions, workshops, and community gatherings throughout the week.

Program Themes to Watch at WCEU 2026

The rest of the WCEU themes are organized around topics that reflect the breadth of the WordPress ecosystem. These themes give attendees a way to follow the sessions most relevant to their work, from building better sites and improving content discovery to growing sustainable businesses, strengthening security, expanding access, and supporting the people and communities behind the project.

Search, Visibility, and Discovery

Search continues to change, but helping people find the right information remains central to the web. WCEU’s search and SEO sessions look at how AI-generated answers, generative engine optimization, shifting user habits, and new discovery platforms are changing visibility for publishers, businesses, and builders. Sessions include Panel: The Future of SEO, with Kacper Bartoszak, Pam Aungst Cronin, Alex Moss, David Cuesta, and Jovana Smoljanovic Tucakov, as well as Emma Young’s AI Search: Why Your Whole Company Should Care, which looks at why AI-native discovery now affects content, development, partnerships, and business strategy.

AI and the Future of Building

Artificial intelligence has a dedicated presence at WordCamp Europe 2026, with sessions that move beyond general discussion and into practical use cases for marketing, product work, development, and site management. Vito Peleg’s Agentic AI & WordPress: From Prompts to Tools & Systems will explore how teams can move from simple prompts to AI workflows that execute tasks, while Monika Dimitrova’s AI Won’t Save Your Marketing (but it might save your time and money) focuses on how small businesses can use AI without losing the strategy and identity that make their work effective.

Development and Technical Practice

Development sessions at WCEU will focus on how WordPress sites, tools, and workflows are built for long-term use. The program includes a Panel: Inside WordPress 7.0, with contributors discussing the release, its features, and the process behind it, along with sessions such as Anukasha Singh’s Smarter Plugin Permissions with the Abilities API, Ariel Ramos’s Headless WordPress API Security in 10 Minutes, and Dejan Rudić Vranić’s hands-on workshop Build Your Developer Portfolio: A Hands-on Guide to FSE.

Accessibility and Inclusive Design

Accessibility is part of building a better web for everyone, and WCEU’s accessibility sessions give attendees practical ways to make digital experiences more usable, inclusive, and sustainable. This theme connects directly to WordPress’s project values, from how content is structured to how themes, plugins, and interfaces are designed. For designers, developers, content creators, and project leads, these sessions offer a chance to make accessibility part of everyday decisions rather than a final step at the end of a project.

Content, Writing, and Communication

Content and writing sessions at WCEU will focus on how clearer communication helps users find what they need, teams share what they know, and communities make information easier to understand. Pooja Sanwal’s Why Writing Still Matters in a Video-First Internet looks at the role of written content as video continues to dominate online traffic, Fernando Tellado’s Do You Really Need an SEO/GEO Pugin for WordPress? explores what WordPress can already do for visibility, and Birgit Olzem’s Documentation as a Love Language for the Future You looks at how simple documentation practices can help teams and communities preserve knowledge.

Security and Trust

Security remains central to maintaining websites people can rely on. WCEU’s security-focused sessions look beyond basic reminders and into the risks, systems, and decisions that shape safer WordPress experiences. The broader program includes talks on AI-assisted spam and bot detection, plugin permissions, and secure headless WordPress architectures, giving attendees practical ways to think about resilience, trust, and responsible site management.

Business and Sustainable Growth

The business sessions at WCEU will explore how WordPress professionals turn ideas, services, and products into sustainable work. Debbie Levitt’s Three Levels of Atomic Product-Market Fit looks at how teams can understand product-market fit beyond a single metric, Irfani Silviana’s WordPress ROI Map: Engineering Business Value with BMC connects technical decisions to business outcomes, and Liza Bogatyrev’s Stop Positioning Into Obscurity to Unlock Growth focuses on how clearer positioning can support revenue and adoption.

Education, Contribution, and Community

WordPress grows when people can learn, participate, and find a place to contribute. WCEU’s education and community sessions include Panel: Rethinking Learning in WordPress, featuring Mary Hubbard, Rade Jekic, Klaus Harris, Natalia Basiura, and Benjamin Zekavica, along with Daniel Grzonka’s The New Engineer: Psychology, Systems, and Open Source, Ivana Ćirković’s What It (Really) Means To Be a Part of the WP Credits Program?, and Jörg Pareigis’s Sovereign University AI Tutors Powered by WordPress. Together, these sessions connect contributor onboarding, academic partnerships, open source learning, and the future skills people need to work with WordPress.

Explore the Full Program

WordCamp Europe 2026 will bring together many parts of the WordPress ecosystem in one place: software, publishing, business, design, education, and community. The keynotes and theme-based sessions offer a broad look at how WordPress is being used today and how contributors, builders, and users are preparing for what comes next.

Explore the full WordCamp Europe 2026 schedule and choose the sessions that match how you use, build, teach, support, or contribute to WordPress. Tickets are available now for attendees joining the community in Kraków. All sessions will be live streamed. Keep checking back for updates. 

Kraków is calling. See you at WordCamp Europe 2026!

Every WordPress release celebrates an artist who has made an indelible mark on the world of music. Say Hello to WordPress 7.0 “Armstrong”, named in honor of “Satchmo” himself, jazz musician Louis Armstrong.

Known as the “first great jazz soloist”, Louis Armstrong created ensembles that highlighted his own profound trumpeting skills, and in the process, transformed jazz from an orchestral art form into a solo art form. The master trumpeter also impressed the world with his signature vocals, introducing improvisation into Jazz, influencing every artist he worked with, and permanently changing the landscape of music.

Louis Armstrong wove his personal touch into the world of Jazz. With WordPress 7.0 “Armstrong”, you can build with yours.

Welcome to WordPress 7.0!

WordPress 7.0 marks the start of a new era, laying the foundation for AI across the WordPress experience. Greeting you with a modern, more intuitive dashboard, 7.0 introduces enhanced customization and development tools that inspire creativity and tap into endless potential.

Whether you’re a creator, business owner or developer – WordPress 7.0 let’s you create in a way that is uniquely your own.

What’s inside

Explore AI abilities directly in your website, all managed from a central hub. Slide seamlessly through the sleek, new admin theme implemented across the dashboard. Ignite creative flow with new blocks and design tools, and tap into an expansive developer toolbox that gives you more control than ever, letting you create your way.

AI-Integrated WordPress

Possibilities right in your hands.

With AI integrated throughout WordPress the potential is endless. A new AI Client in Core lets WordPress communicate with generative AI models, while connections are easily managed from a single hub in the dashboard. The AI Client combined with the Abilities API makes a fiery duo that introduces new functionality, workflow automation, and creation tools to your website. Install the new AI plugin to expand your options even more: generate and edit images, create titles or excerpts, or even suggest alt text.

7.0 also includes a new Client-Side Abilities package: a Javascript counterpart to the Abilities API, with a built in UI and command palette that delivers extensive new and hybrid AI abilities.

Manage all your external connections in a central hub on the Connector’s screen. Easily dive in with 3 presets, or add your own connections. Authenticate and get started with AI abilities in just a few clicks.

An AI-integrated WordPress promises infinite potential, ready to be discovered.

Modernized Dashboard

Elevate your admin experience.

7.0 introduces a fully revitalized dashboard with a chic, modern new color scheme, and clean finishes throughout.

Polished with smooth transitions that seamlessly shift as you move between screens, you’ll feel like you’re effortlessly gliding through the dashboard.

Just one click of the new Command Palette shortcut, a ⌘K or Ctrl+K icon in the upper admin bar, lets you access your favorite tools from anywhere in the dashboard.

Explore typography from one place, regardless of theme. Install, upload and manage your font collection from the new dedicated font management page, with support for block, hybrid and classic themes.

Visually scrub through revision versions to see what changed at a glance, with markers that make editorial choices more intuitive. Easily pick the revision you want and restore instantly.

Design, Create, Customize

A simpler way to build.

Let WordPress be your muse with new blocks, block supports, and design tools that add visual agility, granular control, and keep every element of your website on brand, with fresh new touches.

Showcase your ideas in a lightbox slideshow with the new gallery block, and finesse your markup with the new Heading block. Deliver clear site navigation with the new Breadcrumbs block, and add more detail to your designs with the new Icons block.

Enhanced responsiveness controls in 7.0 make your site more user friendly. Hide and reveal blocks based on device, without affecting other viewports.

Design and build your menu overlay with blocks and patterns, fully customizable with the styles you want visitors to see. Add columns, stylize typography, or embed your own close button in the overlay. Start with a template or create your own menu from scratch.

Fine tune page design and layout with Patterns that act as a single unit, detachable for more isolated control. Insert your pattern, swap elements and customize with ease.

Style every detail of content with custom CSS at the block level, right in your post or page.

Developer’s toolbox

Advanced tools for building your way.

WordPress 7.0 lets you build faster, better, stronger, and easier with an extensive set of  expanded APIs and enhanced functionality.

Create blocks and patterns on the server level using only PHP, auto-registered with the block API.

Explore a more extensible Site Editor, with routing, route validation, and a new wordpress/boot package that allows plugins to build custom site-editor pages.

And much more

For a comprehensive overview of all the new features and enhancements in WordPress 7.0, please visit the feature-showcase website.

Check out whats new in 7.0

Learn more about WordPress 7.0

Learn WordPress is a free resource for new and experienced WordPress users. Learn is stocked with how-to videos on using various features in WordPress, interactive workshops for exploring topics in-depth, and lesson plans for diving deep into specific areas of WordPress.

Read the WordPress 7.0 Release Notes for information on installation, enhancements, fixed issues, release contributors, learning resources, and the list of file changes.

Explore the WordPress 7.0 Field Guide and learn about the changes in this release with detailed developer notes to help you build with WordPress.

The 7.0 release squad

Every release comes to you from a dedicated team of enthusiastic contributors who help keep things on track and moving smoothly. The team that has led 7.0 is a global, cross-functional group of contributors who are always ready to champion ideas, remove blockers, and resolve issues.

• Release Lead: Matias Ventura
• Release Coordination: Ahmed Kabir Chaion, Amy Kamala, Mary Hubbard
• Tech Leads: Ella van Durpe, Mukesh Panchal, Sergey Biryukov
• Triage Leads: Jb Audras, JuanMa Garrido
• Test Leads: Ankit K Gupta, Mary Baum

Thank you, contributors

The mission of WordPress is to democratize publishing and embody the freedoms that come with open source. A global and diverse community of people collaborating to strengthen the software supports this effort.

WordPress 7.0 reflects the tireless efforts and passion of more than 875+ contributors in countries all over the world. This release also welcomed over 200+ first-time contributors!

Their collaboration delivered more than 420 enhancements and fixes, ensuring a stable release for all – a testament to the power and capability of the WordPress open source community.

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More than 70 locales have fully translated WordPress 7.0 into their language. Community translators are working hard to ensure more translations are on their way. Thank you to everyone who helps make WordPress available in 200+ languages.

Thank you to the more than 21 web hosts that have tested pre-release versions for WordPress 7.0, helping ensure that WordPress and hosting platforms are fully compatible, free of errors, and optimized for the best possible user experience.

Last but not least, thanks to the volunteers who contribute to the support forums by answering questions from WordPress users worldwide.

Get involved

Participation in WordPress goes far beyond coding. And learning more and getting involved is easy. Discover the teams that come together to Make WordPress and use this interactive tool to help you decide which is right for you.

This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it’s recommended that you evaluate RC4 on a test server and site.

Reaching this phase of the release cycle is an important milestone. While release candidates are considered ready for release, testing remains crucial to ensure that everything in WordPress 7.0 is the best it can be.

You can test WordPress 7.0 RC4 in four ways:

The scheduled final release date for WordPress 7.0 is May 20, 2026. The full release schedule can be found here. Your help testing Beta and RC versions is vital to making this release as stable and powerful as possible. Thank you to everyone who helps with testing!

Please continue checking the Make WordPress Core blog for 7.0-related posts in the coming weeks for more information.

What’s in WordPress 7.0 RC4?

Want to look deeper into the details and technical notes for this release? Take a look at the WordPress 7.0 Field Guide. For technical information related to the issues addressed since RC3, you can browse the following links:

• Closed 7.0 WordPress Core Trac tickets since May 8, 2026
• 7.0 Gutenberg commits since May 8, 2026

How you can contribute

WordPress is open source software made possible by a passionate community of people collaborating on and contributing to its development. The resources below outline various ways you can get involved with the world’s most popular open source web platform, regardless of your technical expertise.

Get involved in testing

Testing for issues is crucial to the development of any software. It’s also a meaningful way for anyone to contribute. Your help testing the WordPress 7.0 RC4 version is key to ensuring that the final release is the best it can be.

This detailed guide will walk you through testing features in WordPress 7.0. 

For those new to testing, follow this general testing guide for more details on getting set up.

If you encounter a potential bug or issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums or directly to WordPress Trac if you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report. You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs. 

Curious about testing releases in general?  Follow along with the testing initiatives in Make Core and join the #core-test channel on Making WordPress Slack.

Help translate WordPress

Do you speak a language other than English? ¿Español? Français? Русский? 日本語? हिन्दी? বাংলা? मराठी? ಕನ್ನಡ?  You can help translate WordPress into more than 100 languages. This release milestone (RC4) marks the hard string freeze point of the 7.0 release cycle.

An RC4 haiku

Step into the next,

bold, new era of WordPress.

Seven-oh is blessed.

Props to @chaion07 for proofreading and review.

August 16–19, 2026, Phoenix Convention Center – Phoenix, Arizona

Tickets are now available for WordCamp US 2026, taking place August 16–19, 2026, at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona. The flagship event brings together people from across the WordPress community to learn, contribute, share ideas, connect with contributor teams, and help shape the future of an open source project that powers over 40% of the web.

WordCamp US is designed for people at many points in their WordPress journey, including contributors, developers, designers, marketers, publishers, business owners, educators, students, and anyone who wants to learn more about WordPress. This year’s event will include Contributor Day, where attendees can work alongside contributor teams and learn how to take part in the project; Showcase Day, which highlights real-world uses of WordPress; and two full days of sessions and workshops. The programming will also explore how artificial intelligence is changing the way people create, publish, build, and maintain digital experiences, with WordPress as an important part of that broader conversation.

Gather in Phoenix

This year also brings WordCamp US to downtown Phoenix, where the Phoenix Convention Center is close to restaurants, museums, theaters, galleries, live music, and the Roosevelt Row Arts District. Attendees can stay near the venue, meet with other community members between sessions, and explore a downtown area served by Valley Metro Rail. For those extending their trip, Phoenix also offers access to the wider Sonoran Desert region, including parks, gardens, and outdoor spaces that make the city a distinct setting for this year’s event.

Choose the Ticket That Fits

Several ticket options are available, giving attendees different ways to join or support the event:

• General Admission: A $100 ticket that includes access to all four days of WordCamp US programming, including Contributor Day, Showcase Day, sessions, workshops, lunch and snacks, sponsor booths, and the community social.
• Student: A $25 ticket for students who want to learn more about WordPress, connect with mentors and community members, explore open source contribution, and build practical experience.
• Micro-Sponsor: A $750 ticket that includes the same access and attendee benefits as General Admission while helping support the true cost of the event. Micro-Sponsors will also be listed on the official WordCamp US Sponsors page.

Full ticket details, including refund information, visa support, dietary accommodations, registration requirements, and other attendee information, are available on the ticket page. You can also follow the WordCamp US 2026 website for updates on the schedule, speakers, travel information, and more as the event gets closer.

This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it’s recommended that you evaluate RC3 on a test server and site.

Reaching this phase of the release cycle is an important milestone. As always, testing remains crucial to ensure that everything in WordPress 7.0 is the best it can be.

You can test WordPress 7.0 RC3 in four ways:

The scheduled final release date for WordPress 7.0 is May 20, 2026. The full release schedule can be found here. Your help testing Beta and RC versions is vital to making this release as stable and powerful as possible. Thank you to everyone who helps with testing!

Please continue checking the Make WordPress Core blog for 7.0-related posts in the coming weeks for more information.

What’s in WordPress 7.0 RC3?

Want to look deeper into the details and technical notes for this release? Take a look at the WordPress 7.0 Developer Notes. For technical information related to the 143+ issues addressed since RC2, you can browse the following links:

• Closed 7.0 WordPress Core Trac tickets since March 26, 2026
• 7.0 Gutenberg commits since March 26, 2026

Note: Real Time Collaboration will not be included in the 7.0 release and will be re-evaluated during the 7.1 release cycle. Because of this, this RC3 version is no longer considered a “new Beta 1”.

How you can contribute

WordPress is open source software made possible by a passionate community of people collaborating on and contributing to its development. The resources below outline various ways you can get involved with the world’s most popular open source web platform, regardless of your technical expertise.

Get involved in testing

Testing for issues is crucial to the development of any software. It’s also a meaningful way for anyone to contribute. Your help testing the WordPress 7.0 RC3 version is key to ensuring that the final release is the best it can be.

This detailed guide will walk you through testing features in WordPress 7.0. 

For those new to testing, follow this general testing guide for more details on getting set up.

If you encounter a potential bug or issue, please report it to the Alpha/Beta area of the support forums or directly to WordPress Trac if you are comfortable writing a reproducible bug report. You can also check your issue against a list of known bugs. 

Curious about testing releases in general?  Follow along with the testing initiatives in Make Core and join the #core-test channel on Making WordPress Slack.

Update your theme or plugin

For plugin and theme authors, your products play an integral role in extending the functionality and value of WordPress for all users.

Thanks for continuing to test your themes and plugins with the WordPress 7.0 beta releases. If you haven’t yet, make sure to conclude your testing and update the “Tested up to” version in your plugin’s readme file to 7.0.

If you find compatibility issues, please post detailed information to the support forum.

Test on your hosting platforms

Web hosts provide vital infrastructure for supporting WordPress and its users. Testing on hosting systems helps inform the development process while ensuring that WordPress and hosting platforms are fully compatible, free of errors, optimized for the best possible user experience, and that updates roll out to customer sites without issue.

Thank you to the Hosts who helped test variations of new RTC architecture: Kinsta, Bluehost, GoDaddy, WordPress.com, XServer, and Ionos, and to the hosts who participate in distributed testing regularly.

Want to test WordPress on your hosting system? Get started with configuring distributed hosting tests here.

Help translate WordPress

Do you speak a language other than English? ¿Español? Français? Русский? 日本語? हिन्दी? বাংলা? मराठी? ಕನ್ನಡ?  You can help translate WordPress into more than 100 languages. This release milestone (RC3) marks the hard string freeze point of the 7.0 release cycle.

An RC3 haiku

By the tides of sea,
where wind moves gently through trees,
sprouts up RC3.

Props to @desrosj, @peterwilsoncc for proofreading and review.

WordCamp US 2026 will take place August 16–19 in Phoenix, Arizona, and applications are now open for sponsors, speakers, and volunteers. WordCamp US is the flagship gathering for the WordPress community in North America, where contributors, builders, and users come together to share ideas and help shape what comes next for the open web. Full details are available on the WordCamp US 2026 site.

Sponsor

Sponsorships keep WordCamp US accessible. They fund the production and programming that make a flagship WordCamp possible while keeping ticket prices low for attendees, and, in return, sponsors gain direct visibility within one of the most engaged technology ecosystems. Packages support both in-person and digital participation, with opportunities to connect with agencies, developers, and enterprise teams that build on WordPress every day.

Speak

The organizing team is looking for strong ideas with practical takeaways from across the community, whether that means a personal story, a lesson learned in production, or a perspective on where publishing, AI, and the open web are heading. Sessions can take the form of traditional talks, workshops, or more interactive formats, and new or underrepresented voices are especially encouraged to apply. Prior speaking experience is not required.

Speaker applications due by May 29, 2026.

Volunteer

Volunteers are essential to the experience of the event. They welcome attendees and support sessions throughout the week, helping create the inclusive environment that defines a flagship WordCamp. Volunteering is also one of the best ways to meet people from across the global community and see firsthand how an event of this scale comes together. No prior experience is needed, and volunteers receive a free ticket.

Volunteer applications due by June 15, 2026.

Attend

It’s the people. It’s the friendships and the stories.

Matt Mullenweg, WordPress Cofounder

WordCamp US continues a long tradition of in-person gatherings where contributors meet face-to-face to openly discuss the project’s direction. Whether you participate as a sponsor, take the stage, join the volunteer team, or help organize the event, your involvement shapes what the event becomes.

To stay informed as ticket sales open and the schedule takes shape, subscribe to WordCamp US 2026 updates.

When WordPress Campus Connect workshops first began reaching universities, the goal was straightforward: help students discover WordPress, understand the value of open source, and see that contribution can be part of their learning journey. In many cases, that first introduction created immediate interest. Students who had never worked with WordPress before started asking questions, exploring what the software could do, and showing curiosity about the wider community.

That early response also revealed a gap. A workshop could spark interest, but it could not always sustain it on its own. Encouraging students to attend local WordPress meetups helped extend that first connection and, in some cases, brought new energy to existing local communities. Even so, it became clear that campuses needed something more consistent and closer to students’ everyday environment.

WordPress Student Clubs emerged from that need. Instead of limiting engagement to a single event, these clubs create an ongoing, student-led presence on campus where students can keep learning, share knowledge with peers, and grow more confident over time. They also offer a practical bridge between first exposure and deeper participation, helping students move from curiosity to contribution through regular activity and community support.

Learning What Sustains Participation

As WordPress Student Clubs started forming across campuses, the early enthusiasm was encouraging, but sustaining that momentum proved to be one of the first real challenges. Student Club Organizers shared that interest was often strongest at the beginning, especially after a workshop or an introductory session, but turning that interest into regular participation required patience and experimentation. Like many community efforts, the clubs needed time to find a rhythm that worked for the students involved.

One of the most common challenges was consistency. Many students were interested in learning WordPress, but regular engagement depended on more than initial curiosity. Organizers found that participation grew more steadily when activities felt approachable and useful, especially when students could learn by doing rather than only listening. Small learning sessions, collaborative exercises, and hands-on activities often made it easier for students to return and take part again.

Organizers also noticed that some students were initially hesitant to engage actively. Asking questions, speaking up in a group, or volunteering to help lead a session did not always happen naturally. Building a club meant creating an environment where students felt comfortable enough to participate, try something new, and gradually take ownership of their own learning.

Academic schedules added another layer of complexity. Because the clubs are student-led, planning around classes, assignments, and exams required flexibility. Keeping activities regular without overwhelming organizers or participants meant working within the rhythms of campus life. Those early difficulties became part of the learning process and helped shape how the clubs began to operate more effectively.

Building Through Small, Consistent Activities

As organizers worked through those challenges, certain approaches began to show results. Instead of focusing on large events, many clubs found momentum through simple, repeatable activities that students could join without feeling intimidated. Regular learning sessions, small hands-on workshops, and peer-to-peer discussions helped create an environment that felt both welcoming and practical.

That steady approach mattered. When students could return to familiar formats and see progress from one session to the next, clubs became easier to sustain. Organizers were able to build routines, and participants could join at their own pace. Over time, those small efforts started to strengthen participation more effectively than occasional large events.

Student ownership also played an important role. As students began sharing what they had learned, helping their peers, and taking part in running sessions, engagement started to grow more organically. These moments helped shift the clubs from being simply learning spaces to becoming communities in their own right. Students were not only using WordPress in a classroom context. They were also beginning to understand it as part of a collaborative open source project shaped by people who learn together, build together, and support one another.

Guidance from the local WordPress community helped reinforce that progress. Although the clubs are student-led, organizers benefited from having experienced community members available as mentors. Mentors helped them think through session structure, activity planning, and the practical challenge of staying motivated while balancing academic responsibilities. That kind of support gave organizers more confidence to experiment and keep building.

Mentorship also connected campus activity to the broader WordPress ecosystem. Students were not learning in isolation. Through local community guidance, they were able to see how meetups, contributions, and collaboration all fit into a larger network of people who have been participating in WordPress for years. That connection gave the work happening on campus greater meaning and helped students see a clearer path forward.

Early Impact Across Campuses

Although WordPress Student Clubs are still in an early stage, signs of impact are already visible. Organizers have shared that more students are showing interest in learning WordPress and in exploring what open source participation can look like in practice. In several cases, students who first joined as learners are now contributing to discussions, helping peers during sessions, and organizing club activities themselves.

That shift from passive participation to active involvement is one of the clearest signs of growth. It suggests that the clubs are beginning to create more than awareness. They are creating opportunities for students to build confidence, practice leadership, and develop a stronger sense of connection to the WordPress community. Even at this stage, that kind of change points to the long-term value of sustaining engagement on campus.

One encouraging example came during the International Women’s Day celebration in Ajmer, India, where students participated alongside members of the local WordPress community. Organizers noted that the event included 100 female attendees, with around 50% of participants coming from student clubs. For many of those students, it was a first opportunity to take part in a broader community event, meet other contributors, and see how open source communities collaborate in practice.

Experiences like that show how student-led initiatives can extend beyond campus and begin contributing to the wider community. They also create space for new voices to participate. As students move from club sessions into local events, they gain experience not only as learners but also as community members who can help shape what comes next.

The clubs are also creating leadership opportunities on campus. Organizers have stepped into new roles by coordinating activities, encouraging participation, and maintaining momentum over time. Those experiences help students build skills that matter both within the WordPress community and beyond it, including communication, organization, and problem-solving.

“Being a Student Club Organizer helped me improve my leadership and communication skills.”
— Sanjeevni Kumari, WordPress Student Club Organizer, Mahila Engineering College, Ajmer

Looking Ahead

WordPress Student Clubs are still developing, but the journey so far points to a promising direction. What began as an effort to sustain interest after WordPress Campus Connect is gradually becoming a more durable model for ongoing learning and collaboration on campus. The clubs are helping students stay connected to WordPress beyond a first introduction, while also creating stronger links between educational spaces and local communities.

That longer-term potential is one reason this work matters. With regular campus activity and continued mentorship, Student Clubs can help create a stronger foundation for future contributors. They can also help students build confidence before attending local meetups, contributing to community efforts, or participating in events beyond their campuses.

“With regular on-campus activities through WordPress Student Clubs, the real impact may become visible over the next couple of years, as a stronger WordPress ecosystem begins to take shape within campuses.”
— Anand Upadhyay, Student Club Mentor

As more students get involved and take ownership of these spaces, WordPress Student Clubs can continue to open pathways to learning, leadership, and community participation. For campuses, they offer a way to keep the momentum going after Campus Connect. For the broader project, they represent another step toward welcoming more students into the WordPress open source ecosystem. To follow this work and explore how it connects with the wider community, readers can look to WordPress Campus Connect, WordPress Meetups, and other education and community initiatives across WordPress.org.

Note: Much of the credit belongs to @webtechpooja (Pooja Derashri) for help in writing this piece.