WordCamp Canada heads to Vancouver this November. The main conference runs November 5 and 6 at UBC Robson Square, with Contributor Day the day before at the BCIT Tech Collider. Organizers expect more than 300 people, and they’ve built the event around three themes: Connection, Community and Contribution.
Many of the sessions are more connected than their titles suggest. Talks on AI agents sit next to talks on accessibility, block development, product strategy and what it means to be a developer right now, and most of them end up circling the same concerns. A talk about AI coding tools turns out to be about engineering discipline. A talk about block registration turns out to be about how agencies price their work. The program is a fairly good snapshot of where WordPress is in 2026.
The Event Itself
The full schedule is now out. Contributor Day runs from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Pacific on November 4, and each of the two main days runs two tracks side by side, one for talks and one for longer hands-on workshops. Tickets cover lunches, breaks, sponsor areas and an afterparty.
Contributor Day on November 4 deserves more attention than it usually gets. Coding is on the list, but so are documentation, translation, design, accessibility testing, support, marketing, photography and community work. Anyone who has spent time around WordPress knows the project runs on all of that, and a lot of it never touches a line of PHP.
There are 18 sessions in total, nine on each day. Andy Peatling’s keynote takes the 11:15 a.m. slot on November 5, and Mary Baum’s fireside chat fills the same slot on November 6, with her guest still to be announced. The two days have quite different personalities. The first ranges across freelancing, block development, accessibility, client training, community and the Abilities API. The second leans heavily into AI, with six of its nine sessions filed under AI Development or AI Workflow.
AI Is All Over the Agenda
AI shows up in more sessions than any other subject, and what stands out is how specific the conversation has become. Nobody is debating whether WordPress people should use generative AI anymore. The talks are about how to structure AI workflows, how to check what the tools produce, what happens when agents start interacting with websites, and when it makes sense to leave AI out of a product entirely.
From One-Off Prompts to Pipelines
Stéphane Boisvert and Mikey Arce are leading “From Skills to Systems: Building Your Own Agentic Pipeline,” a 90-minute workshop on the afternoon of November 6 that looks at turning scattered prompts and tools into workflows a team can actually repeat.
Anyone who has watched AI adoption inside a company will recognize the starting point. One person finds a prompt that works. Someone else wires up a small automation. A team hooks a model into a single process. It’s often impressive, and it often falls apart when the person who built it goes on vacation.
Making it repeatable means doing the boring parts properly: defining inputs, deciding what the agent is and isn’t responsible for, validating what comes out, and knowing where failures go. On a WordPress site connected to a CRM, an analytics stack, a commerce platform, identity services and a handful of internal APIs, an agent is one more system in the mix and needs the same care as the others.
Treating AI Output as Untrusted
Earlier that morning, Chris Reynolds’ talk, “Parenting Claude: Guardrails for AI-assisted development,” covers project contracts, verification loops and the habit of treating AI-generated work as untrusted until someone has checked it.
Most AI development pitches lead with speed, and the speed is real. Getting from idea to prototype is faster, and repetitive work goes quicker. But generated code can look perfectly reasonable and still carry bugs, security holes or design choices that don’t fit the rest of the system. Better tools make those problems easier to miss, since the output looks more convincing.
None of this will surprise an enterprise engineering team. Code review, testing, staged deployments and clear ownership were already how good teams worked. AI changes who or what writes the first draft. It doesn’t remove the need to check it, and it probably makes checking more important.
Not Every Product Needs an AI Feature
Taylor Waldon’s “Stay Centred in the AI Gold Rush: Product Focus Over Feature Hype” takes on the pressure to ship AI features because everyone else is.
It’s easy to see how that happens. A competitor launches something, customers start asking about it, an internal team builds a demo, and suddenly the feature is on the roadmap before anyone has said what problem it solves. Waldon’s argument is to start from the product and ask whether AI actually makes the experience better.
Enterprise platforms feel this more than most. Every feature has to be supported, secured, monitored and eventually reworked. An AI feature that genuinely helps users can earn that cost. One that doesn’t is just another thing to maintain.
AI Is Changing How Sites Get Found
A couple of sessions look at AI from the other side: how it reads and recommends websites.
Writing for Machines as Well as People
Joey Kudish’s “Hello, Robots: How AI Sees Your WordPress Site,” a 90-minute session that kicks off November 6, gets into practical AEO and GEO for WordPress.
For a long time, sites were built for two audiences: people and search engines. Generative AI adds another one. Answer engines summarize content and often skip the list of links altogether. A page can rank well in Google and barely register in AI answers. A brand can get mentioned without a citation, and a smaller site can end up as the source an AI leans on.
SEO hasn’t gone anywhere, but the basics underneath it count for more than they used to. Clean markup, good metadata, sensible internal linking and a clear information architecture help machines work out what a page is about. A site can look great and still be hard for an AI system to parse if that groundwork is sloppy.
When Agents Pick the Platform
Andy Peatling’s keynote on November 5, “The New Front Door,” goes a step further. His point is that AI agents are starting to influence which platforms people build on, and WordPress needs to be ready for that.
Platform decisions used to involve developers, procurement, agencies and executives. Now an AI assistant helping someone set up a website might suggest a platform before that person has looked at a single product page. Agents may also decide which services to connect to. If that becomes common, how clearly WordPress can explain its capabilities to a machine will count for about as much as how it presents itself to people.
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Development Is Getting More Connected
Several technical sessions share a theme: less focus on building individual features, more on how the pieces of a platform work together.
The Abilities API
Nik McLaughlin’s “Abilities API for Humans” explains how the Abilities API changes WordPress architecture and how developers can use it for things that have nothing to do with AI.
That last part is worth noting. It’s tempting to view every new WordPress capability through whatever is hottest at the moment, but a structured way to expose what a site can do will stay useful long after the current AI cycle. Enterprise setups rarely involve a single application. Content moves between systems, services talk to each other through APIs, and well-defined boundaries make the whole arrangement easier to change.
Interactivity Without the Extra Stack
Ryan Welcher’s workshop, “Building Dynamic Gallery Experiences with the WordPress Interactivity API,” walks through building a gallery slider with directives, state and mobile gestures.
It’s a hands-on exercise, but it points to something bigger. Rich front-end behaviour used to mean pulling in another framework or a layer of custom JavaScript. Those are still valid choices sometimes, and they also add weight. The more WordPress can handle interaction natively, the more often teams can skip that extra layer, which usually means less to maintain later.
Blocks and the Bottom Line
Benjamin Zekavica’s “Custom Block Economics: WordPress 7.0 for Agencies” connects changes to block registration with how agencies scope and price work.
Anyone who has run an agency knows architecture choices show up on the invoice. When blocks are easier to register and maintain, projects ship sooner. Reusable components save repeated effort across sites, and maintainable code keeps support costs down. The most elaborate architecture isn’t necessarily the best one. Often the best one is simply the setup that lets a team make routine changes without a rebuild.
Building Sites That Survive Real Use
Sites change after launch. New editors arrive, content grows in directions nobody planned for, and requirements shift. A platform that only holds together while its original builders are around is going to have problems.
Design that Holds Up After Handoff
Anton Plauche’s “Building Resilient Experiences: Simplify Collaboration with Intrinsic Design” looks at intrinsic design, modern CSS and theme.json as ways to build sites that hold up after client handoff.
Most agency teams have seen a design that looked perfect at launch fall apart within months. Editors paste in content the mockups never accounted for. Components get combined in odd ways. The brand gets refreshed, and campaigns need pages nobody designed. Flexible layouts, a solid design system and sensible editing controls are what keep a site intact through all of it.
Training as Part of the Build
Robbie Adair’s “Beyond Launch: Empower Your WordPress Clients with Training” picks up where handoff ends, with AI-assisted documentation and video training that cut down on support requests.
A technically excellent build can still frustrate the people using it every day if they don’t understand the content model, the reusable components or the publishing workflow. Good training and documentation decide how much use a client actually gets out of the platform after the development team has moved on, so they belong in the project scope.
Shanta Nathwani’s “Intro to WordPress & the Dashboard,” a 90-minute workshop on the first morning, sits in the same Handoff and Training category and gives newer users a grounding in the basics.
Accessibility Still Has a Strong Presence
Even with all the AI talk, accessibility holds its ground in the program, and it should. New interfaces and development patterns don’t reduce accessibility obligations. They create new places for those obligations to apply.
When WCAG Doesn’t Have a Pattern
Matt Litzinger opens the second day with “No Pattern? No Problem: Solving Accessibility Challenges at the Edge of WCAG,” which deals with situations where there’s no established pattern to follow.
This is the hard end of accessibility work. Standards cover a lot, but real products throw up cases they don’t anticipate: a component that combines behaviours in a new way, a design system edge case, content that technically passes and still confuses people. Solving those takes judgement, and it works best when accessibility is part of design, development and QA from the beginning.
Learning It by Doing It
Michelle Frechette’s “The Adventures of a Novice’s Journey into Web Accessibility” comes from a practitioner’s angle, looking at how accessibility gets learned through mistakes, fixes and practical techniques.
Nobody arrives knowing all of it. Teams find inaccessible patterns, fix them, and gradually build what they’ve learned into their components, testing and content workflows. The work is never finished, but the process gets stronger each time around.
What It Means to Work in WordPress Now
A few sessions step back from the technology to look at the people doing the work.
More than Technical Skill
Daniel Paz’s “Staying Relevant as a WordPress Developer in 2026,” one of the last sessions on November 6, lists performance, accessibility, business strategy and community knowledge as skills that will keep their value.
That’s a broad list, and it reflects how much the job has changed. A developer on an enterprise WordPress project might need to think about front-end performance, structured content, analytics, APIs and business goals on top of the WordPress work itself. AI can take on some of the implementation, but someone still has to decide what gets built and whether it’s right. That part of the job is getting bigger.
The Human Side of AI
Emily Kaija’s “The Elephant in the (Server) Room: Honest Conversations About AI, Identity, and the Future of Our Work” looks at how AI is affecting skills, careers and how developers see themselves.
It’s good to see this at a technical conference. Most AI discussion centres on benchmarks and productivity numbers, which say little about what it feels like when a tool starts doing work that used to be part of someone’s professional identity. An honest conversation about that uncertainty is more credible than pretending AI is purely good news or purely a threat.
Community Keeps WordPress Running
Few major platforms depend on community contribution the way WordPress does, and WordCamp is where that’s easiest to see.
How People Talk to Each Other
Mika Epstein’s “I See You, Lion: Communication in Community” runs in the last slot on November 5 and is the one session in the program filed under Community. For a project held together by volunteers spread across time zones and languages, communication is about as concrete a topic as there is.
Freelancers Working Together
Alexanne Laplante’s “Stop Building Alone: How Smart Freelancers Use Collaboration to Take On Bigger Projects Without Burning Out,” the first talk of the conference, looks at how independent professionals team up for larger projects instead of hiring.
The advice is aimed at freelancers, but it applies to anyone working on complex WordPress builds. A big project can call for strategy, UX, design, engineering, accessibility, analytics, content, infrastructure and AI expertise. No one person covers all of that, so knowing who to bring in is a real part of being able to deliver.
What This Says About Enterprise WordPress
Looking across the program as a whole, a few things stand out for organizations running WordPress at enterprise scale.
- AI and governance go together. Whether it’s agentic workflows, AI-assisted coding or AI features in a product, the same questions about validation, control and accountability keep coming up. The experimentation phase is mostly over.
- Platforms need to be built for change. The Abilities API, the Interactivity API, block improvements, intrinsic design and better handoff all aim at keeping a site easy to evolve as it grows.
- Being found now involves machines. Sites have to make sense to AI systems and agents as well as to search engines and people, which puts structured content and information architecture back near the top of the list.
- Accessibility and performance haven’t gone anywhere. As platforms get more complex, the fundamentals carry more weight.
And people are still at the centre of it. Training, collaboration, career development and community contribution come up again and again, a healthy check on the idea that the future of the web is mostly about automation.
See You in Vancouver
This is our third year in a row sponsoring WordCamp Canada, and this year’s program feels especially close to home. A lot of what’s on the schedule is what we work on every day: putting AI to work inside real enterprise workflows, building WordPress platforms that still hold up years after launch, getting accessibility right, and making sure our clients’ teams feel confident running what we’ve built together.
We’re particularly looking forward to the second day, when the AI sessions move past what the tools can do and into how teams should actually use them. The talks on handoff, resilient design and accessibility hit just as close, since so much of a platform’s real life starts after launch.
WordCamp is also one of the few places where the whole WordPress community ends up in the same room, from core contributors and freelancers to agencies like ours. That’s a big part of why we keep coming back.
If you’re there, come find us. We’d love to hear what you’re building, what’s working with AI and what isn’t, or which session changed your thinking. And if your organization is working out how its platform needs to evolve for AI, accessibility or a more complex digital ecosystem, we’re always happy to talk it through, in Vancouver or afterwards.
