Funeral For A Friend: WordCamp US 2026 Is A Wake With A Sponsor Hall

WordCamp US 2026 opened yesterday at the Phoenix Convention Center. Four days, 100 North 3rd Street, August 16th to 19th. Contributor Day, Showcase Day, two conference days, lunch, snacks, and a community social. The tagline is 'Powered by WordPress, Driven by Community'. The subtext is 'please come, we booked Hall E'.

I have nothing against the organisers. They are volunteers, mostly, doing an enormous amount of unpaid work in a city where the August daytime average is around 40°C. That is not the story. The story is what the programme, the numbers and the guest list tell you when you read them the way you would read a coroner's report rather than a press release.

Because that is what this is. Not a celebration. A funeral for a friend — with a job board in the foyer.

Exhibit A: the ticket numbers nobody wanted printed

WordCamp Central publishes ticket revenue data, which means the community can count. Kevin Geary counted. So did The Repository and wp-content.co, both of whom ran the story in mid-July.

• →2023 — 2,149 tickets sold.
• →2024 — 1,928 tickets sold.
• →2025 (Portland) — 1,200 tickets. A 38% collapse in one year.
• →2026 (Phoenix) — around 280 tickets sold roughly a month out, climbing to about 440–445 by mid-July, against an official 'anticipated' 1,200–2,000 on the event's own About page.

Read that last line again. The flagship event of the platform that allegedly runs 43% of the web could not shift 500 tickets four weeks before the doors opened. Not 500,000. Five hundred.

The community's explanations were, predictably, everything except the obvious one. It's the Phoenix heat. It's the late schedule. It's the speaker lineup being announced in four dribbling rounds over four days in July. It's marketing that 'only just started ramping up'. All true, all real, all organisational — and all of it also true of a hundred conferences that still sell out because people desperately want to be in the room.

“When your event stops selling, the venue is never the reason. The reason is that fewer people believe being there will change their year.”

Geary's read was blunter and better: declining numbers show WordPress is 'not doing just fine'. He is right, and the interesting part is how much energy the ecosystem spent arguing about air conditioning rather than engaging with that sentence.

Exhibit B: 2025's problem was that Automattic laid people off

Here is the detail that should end the 'it's just logistics' defence. WCUS 2025 got off to a late start because Automattic's layoffs disrupted the organising handover. 2026 is late again, for the second year running.

Think about what that means structurally. The flagship community event of a supposedly independent open source project cannot be organised on time when one private company cuts headcount. That is not a community-driven conference. That is a corporate offsite wearing a community lanyard, and when the corporation gets thinner, the 'community' event wobbles.

And 2025 had one more accelerant: ticket sales cratered in the wake of Mullenweg's WCUS 2024 keynote and everything that followed it. The Automattic versus WP Engine war did not just burn legal fees. It burned the one thing a volunteer ecosystem actually runs on, which is goodwill. You cannot subpoena that back.

Exhibit C: the programme is 18 sessions about the thing that is killing it

Four tracks this year: AI, Honing Your Skills, Technical WordPress, and a new beginner track called WP101. At least eighteen sessions are AI-focused or AI-adjacent — the largest AI showing at a flagship WordCamp ever. Read the titles out loud and try to hear anything other than a platform negotiating its own terms of surrender.

• →'The Agentic Web Is Coming – Is WordPress Ready?' — the question mark is doing Olympic-grade work there.
• →'Beyond Plugins: When to Move Workflows Outside WordPress' — a session, at WordCamp, on leaving WordPress.
• →'How to Vibe Code in WordPress for Non-Techies' — the exact practice that WordPress developers spent all of 2025 insisting was a security apocalypse, now with a room and a projector.
• →'Beyond Vibe-Coding: Build an AI Pipeline That Ships Production-Ready Plugins' — because the directory needed more plugins.
• →'Staying Relevant as a WordPress Developer in 2026' — a title that would be a cry for help anywhere else.
• →'You're the Only One at Your Company Who Understands WordPress. Now What?' — that is not a session, that is a diagnosis.
• →'Everything is Fine & Nothing is Good: Design Systems in the Age of AI' — honestly, the best summary of the entire event, and I suspect Michelle Hunt knows it.

Then there's the security strand. Robert Abela of Melapress on 'The Attacker That Never Logged In: Session Hijacking, Stolen Cookies, and the Blind Spot in WordPress Security'. And my personal favourite piece of accidental honesty on the whole schedule: '0 Days Since The Last Supply Chain Attack: Protecting the WordPress Project in an AI World'.

Zero days since the last supply chain attack. That is the joke they are telling on themselves, on stage, at their own flagship event, in the same season the wp2shell pre-auth chain reminded everyone that the vulnerability was in core, not in your dodgy slider plugin.

Exhibit D: 'The WordPress Agency Is Becoming Invisible: Why That Is A Good Thing'

That is a real session title, from Vivek Jain, Chief Business Officer at rtCamp. And credit where it is due — it is the most self-aware talk on the bill.

But look at the reframing move, because you will see it everywhere for the next two years. The WordPress agency isn't shrinking, it's becoming invisible. Your work isn't being commoditised, it's being abstracted. You aren't losing the build, you're 'moving up the value chain' — a phrase that has never once been uttered by somebody whose revenue was going up.

'Invisible' is what you call a thing after it stops being seen. The word for that outside a conference hall is 'gone'.

Exhibit E: the sponsor hall is a hosting company reunion

Sponsorship tiers are named after WordPress user roles, which is charming right up until you notice who holds them. Super Admin: Pressable, Salesforce, WordPress.com. Admin: Bluehost, Elementor, Jetpack, Woo. Editor: Automattic for Agencies, Google, Nexcess, Yoast. Then a long tail of Hostinger, Hosting.com, Kinsta, CloudLinux, InMotion, GreenGeeks, BigScoots, Convesio, Porkbun, Tucows.

Count the categories. Hosting, hosting, hosting, Automattic, Automattic, Automattic, one SEO plugin, one page builder, and Google — who are there because AI search is the new distribution and they would like a word with your organic traffic.

This is not an ecosystem of products. It is a cartel of landlords funding a festival for their own tenants. The economics of WordPress were never really about publishing; they were about shared hosting margin, upsold backups, and the maintenance retainer. Everyone in Hall E is selling shelter for a stack that is getting harder to defend.

And in the Admin tier, in pink: Elementor. Weeks after laying off around a third of its workforce, blaming AI, while shipping an off-platform product called Sticklight and an on-platform AI called Angie that competes with its own strategy. That is who is helping pay for the lunch.

Exhibit F: the keynote that is not a keynote

In 2024 Mullenweg gave a keynote and it detonated. In 2026 the closing act is billed differently: Robert Jacobi 'sits down with Ma.tt Mullenweg for a fireside chat about where open source stands today', Wednesday 19th at 4pm, followed by thirty minutes where 'the floor is yours'. The official framing is explicit: 'Think of it less like a keynote and more like the best hallway conversation of the week.'

Translate that from PR into English. Two chairs instead of a lectern. A conversational format that cannot produce a single quotable declaration of war. A closing slot at 4pm on the last day, when a meaningful chunk of the room is already in an Uber to Sky Harbor. And a Q&A that lets people vent in a room rather than on X.

The questions on the billing are: 'How do we keep open source thriving? What should we hold onto? What needs to change?' Those are eulogy questions. Nobody at a healthy company asks what to hold onto. You ask what to hold onto when the movers have arrived.

Exhibit G: Waymo

One of the marquee fireside chats is Waymo's Amanda Ventura on 'Building the World's Most Trusted Driver'. There is also 'Dreaming with AI: Innovation Lessons from the Front Lines of Disney & Meta'.

Both, I am sure, are excellent talks. Neither has the first thing to do with WordPress. And that is exactly the tell. When a platform conference's most exciting speakers are borrowed from industries that have nothing to do with the platform, it is because the platform itself no longer generates enough excitement to fill a keynote slot. You are importing glamour to cover a gap in the story.

Autonomous vehicles at the WordPress conference. A self-driving car explaining trust to an ecosystem whose own core shipped a pre-auth RCE chain. There is a poem in there somewhere and it is not a happy one.

What a wake actually looks like

Here is the thing about the surrounding furniture, and I mean this without a shred of sarcasm: it is lovely, and it is also unmistakably valedictory.

• →The Happiness Bar — a free drop-in desk where a volunteer expert helps you fix whatever has you stuck. Beautiful idea. Also: no platform with a healthy developer experience needs a permanent staffed triage station at its own conference.
• →Career Corner — a job board, a list of who's hiring, and company reps to meet, at an event running one year after mass layoffs across the ecosystem. That is not networking, that is outplacement.
• →'Choose Your Path' schedules, one of which is literally called 'WordCamp Veteran' — the mourner's track.
• →$25 student tickets, guides and mentors. Recruitment drives get aggressive precisely when the natural intake dries up. Nobody had to subsidise students into WordPress in 2013.
• →'The Making of a WordPress Certification' — the certification always arrives after the skill stops being obviously valuable. Ask anyone with a Novell certificate.

The honest version of the schedule

Strip the marketing and the four days read like the five stages of grief, catered.

• →Denial — 'Stop Blaming WordPress: Building a Real Editorial Workflow Without Leaving the Ecosystem.'
• →Anger — every comment thread under every ticket-sales article in July.
• →Bargaining — 'Migrating to Blocks (With Artisanal Care, at Industrial Scale)', because the block editor migration is still, in 2026, being pitched as the future.
• →Depression — 'Surviving the Plugin Stack: A Practical Playbook for Auditing and Simplifying Complex WordPress Sites.' Surviving. Their word.
• →Acceptance — 'Beyond Plugins: When to Move Workflows Outside WordPress' and 'Your First AI-Only Team: Build It, Brief It, and Put It to Work.'

That final track is the one that matters, and it is the one the ecosystem will spend the next eighteen months pretending is a compliment. An AI-only team does not need a maintenance retainer, a plugin licence bundle, a staging environment on managed hosting, or four days in Phoenix. It needs a brief and a budget.

Why the AI track is the eulogy, not the rescue

The bull case for WCUS 2026 is straightforward: look, WordPress is adapting. Eighteen AI sessions. The Abilities API. Agentic workflows. WordPress Agent and Studio demos. The platform is meeting the moment.

The problem is what the AI sessions are teaching. They are not teaching you to use WordPress better. They are teaching you to use something else to survive WordPress: agents to audit the plugin stack, pipelines to generate the plugins, AI to migrate the themes, AI workers to do the update day, AI to write the content the block editor makes tedious to lay out.

When your platform's flagship programme is dominated by tools whose job is to reduce the labour your platform demands, the honest conclusion is not that the platform is modernising. It is that the labour was the product, the labour is now automatable, and the platform's remaining function is to be the thing the automation is pointed at.

Once the agent is doing the work anyway, the obvious question arrives on its own: why point it at 23-year-old PHP, a MySQL install, 60 plugins from unrelated vendors, an update cycle that can break checkout on a Tuesday, and a directory where a huge share of the listings are effectively abandoned — when you could point it at a codebase you own outright?

Nobody is going to ask that from the stage. Everybody is going to ask it in the corridor. That is what a wake is: the eulogies are generous, and the real conversation happens by the drinks table.

To be scrupulously fair

Some of this event is genuinely good, and pretending otherwise would make me exactly the kind of hack I complain about.

• →'When the Platform Belongs to Its Users: Migrating Daily Kos at Scale' and 'Own Your Audience: How The Ankler Outgrew Substack and Built An Independent Platform on WordPress' are real, substantive, enterprise-scale wins. WordPress at the top end, with a proper engineering team behind it, still does serious publishing work.
• →The accessibility and civic-web sessions are the most honourable material on the schedule and deserve a bigger room than they will get.
• →The Happiness Bar helps actual people with actual problems for free, which is more than most software vendors manage with a support contract.
• →'0 Days Since The Last Supply Chain Attack' is exactly the kind of unflinching talk a healthy project needs, and the fact that it exists is to somebody's credit.

None of that changes the arithmetic. Four hundred and forty tickets a month out, against 2,149 three years ago. That is not a repositioning. That is a congregation thinning out.

If you're going, go

Seriously. Go. Wakes matter. Go and see the people you have built alongside for fifteen years, drink the free coffee, sit in the Sonoran heat, and let yourself feel whatever it is you feel about a piece of software that paid your mortgage.

But do two things while you are there. Go to 'Beyond Plugins: When to Move Workflows Outside WordPress' and take notes as if your income depends on it, because it does. And go to Career Corner not because you need a job, but to look at which companies are hiring and for what — that board is a more honest strategy document than any keynote.

Then, when the fireside chat wraps at half past four on Wednesday and the floor is yours for thirty minutes, ask the only question worth the airfare: if the answer to every problem on this schedule is an AI agent, why does the agent need WordPress?

Nobody will answer it. But you will have said it out loud in the room, which is the most respectful thing you can do at a funeral for a friend — tell the truth about how they died.