Last week, I attended WordCamp US 2026, and I learned a lot. Admittedly, I’ve been a little out of the loop lately with recent developments with WordPress as I’ve been largely focused on Shopware for the past year and a half. I’ve seen and used various AI tools with WordPress, but I had no idea how AI-forward it had become. There’s even a Claude plugin for working with WordPress (more on that later). WordCamp had a whole track dedicated to AI, and even some of the talks in the non AI tracks had elements of AI mixed in.
Arrival
I landed in Phoenix mid-afternoon Sunday, so I missed out on contributor day, but I made it to the convention center in time to pick up my badge. The convention center was just a couple blocks away, less than a quarter mile, and while the temps were solidly triple digits the whole week, it was somehow more tolerable than the swampy heat of east TN.
The Keynote
In the keynote Monday Morning, Bo English-Wiczling discussed how AI has altered the developer experience and has inverted the typical adoption curve where adoption has increased while trust has decreased. While it does help to write code faster, maintaining quality requires refining scope and making it more explicit as well as crafting guardrails.
My First AI-only Team
After the keynote, I got my first real taste of agentic AI. I’ve worked with Claude Code a lot, but this was my first time defining skills. The goal was simple – use the WordCamp attendees list to build a short list of the attendees, creating a skill to store that output in a SQLite db and then create another skill to enrich that db with their LinkedIn profiles. It was a very simple task, but it illustrated just how easy it is to build a skill – even without coding knowledge, and just how powerful agentic AI could be.
The AI WP Plugin Factory
After lunch was one of the more interesting talks I attended, because beyond the technical details, the whole thing was peppered with witty movie references (mostly Christopher Nolan movies).
I learned about Principal WP had created a comprehensive Agentic WordPress Plugin Pipeline. This was in the Technical track, but it was 100% AI, and it was fascinating! Not only does this pipeline have coding agents, but also reviewing agents – nine of them!. Each with a different focus. Then comes the testing, which was essentially user testing, but the user was an AI agent, and there was a 5min video of that testing in progress.
What makes this pipeline stand out, though, is that you don’t just give it the requirements and walk away, it interacts with your entire (human) team, through Jira, Slack, Github, and even meeting transcripts. You can assign Jira tickets to it, and it even monitors Slack for ticket mentions that don’t translate to ticket updates.
There are stakeholder agents that have awareness about SEO, analytics, and marketing implications and has the capability to reach out to their respective teams for targeted feedback rather than the usual “hey, can you look at this and let me know if you think this will cause a problem”
What makes this system so robust, though, is its durable memory that gains knowledge over every iteration.
Owning Your Audience
This was an odd fit for the AI track, but Nicola Catton’s talk on Owning Your Audience explored the tradeoffs between growing an audience on a managed platform like Substack and the freedom of having a self-hosted platform like WordPress. Substack may be easy to use, but it just lacks support for certain ad formats and doesn’t allow for as much layout customization. There was also the monetization model – Substack only supports a binary paid or free, and The Ankler wanted subscription tiers among other options.
Another interesting note was how they skipped Figma in the design process entirely and codified their branding design standards directly in the WP block theme editor, locking in global site elements like ad slots, navigation headers, and newsletter group signups.
Building Agent Tools
While this talk was about using AI tools in the editorial process, the first half had more to do with guardrails you can give people. Building block editor patterns is a start, but rtCamp also built an admin sidebar widget giving real-time feedback on content limits such as heading length and count, word count constraints, and several other quality guidelines that also blocked publication if the quality constraints weren’t met.
The AI tooling comes into play within Claude where the user provides the content in the form of a Google Doc. Claude maps out the page layout using the predefined patterns and pattern constraints, and then after approval build the layout with the content, which the user can further refine as desired, all within the Claude window. His tool also selected other relevant content (case studies) to include in a carousel inside the page.
AI Tooling with WP Rig
In this talk, Rob Ruiz introduces an amazingly robust theme framework known as WP Rig. This theme is loaded with build tools and qa tools. It’s a little tricky to get started with, but it elegantly merges flexibility with performance. The theme itself contains an mcp server that provides the AI agents with updated documentation from wprig.io along with a prebuilt CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md file which instruct the LLM to run npm run mcp to access the mcp server as well as npm run ai:check for comprehensive linting and end-to-end regression validation. It also contains phpunit tests including sets of tests for performance and accessibility.
Design Systems in the Age of AI
Tuesday began with an exploration on how AI design trends towards a generic look and it’s important to create systems and controls to ensure that experiences have differentiation driven by human judgement.
Low-Effort Strategies to Connect With Your Site Visitors
In this talk, James Osborne describes a four-step framework to mesure and drive engagement. This all revolves around Site-Kit and Google Analytics. It begins with understanding visitors by looking at which pages are the top landing pages, pages with top traffic and top search queries, and use that data to inform future content. Additionally, it’s important to pay mind to the audience maturity spectrum. If you’re asking for something – a survey, a newsletter signup, a donation, a purchase, a subscription, it should be proportional to the amount of time the user has been engaging with your content.
Abilities API for Humans
In this talk, Nik McLaughlin discusses the Abilities API and that rather treating it as a separate entity to be used to drive MCP servers, plugins should center their architecture around it.
The Making of a WordPress Certification
This is a talk I was excited to attend. A WordPress Certification is huge. WordPress was created 23 years ago, and I started working with WordPress 14 years ago. To say this is a long time coming is an understatement. It covers a variety domains including WP Core, Security, Debugging, Performance, Scalability, etc. It’s roughly 65 multiple-choice questions. It’s a proctored exam, and the cost is $250 which is valid for 3 years and renewable at a 20% discount.
Simplifying the Plugin Stack
As sites age and go through different owners, they often accumulate plugins and sometimes end up with redundant plugins, and sometimes you find a plugin that you thought you didn’t need was actually load bearing. In this talk, Matt Dorman discusses a practical plugin audit process, and even shares a plugin he built to help audit plugins and, hopefully, minimize them.