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Ever wish you could just walk into a room and immediately feel like you belong? That’s what going to WordCamp is like. A large part of the magic of WordPress isn’t the software—it’s the community.
WordCamp Europe 2025, one of three WordPress flagship events, took place in Basel, Switzerland from June 5th to June 7th. Close to 2,000 attendees came to listen to talks, learn, connect, and contribute to the WordPress project.
If you couldn’t make it, don’t worry. While nothing beats the experience of actually being there, this post will give you a detailed summary of some of the most impactful presentations held at the conference. That way, you can stay in the loop with what’s happening in WordPress until you can go yourself.
By the way, all of the presentations from this year’s schedule are also available on Youtube:
Lead organizers Laura Sacco, Steve Mosby, and Uros Tasic greeted 1700+ attendees from 84 countries with a message of unity and connectedness.
Something that stood out this year was the number of newcomers. 26% of attendees had never been to the event before.
After a quick introduction and thanks to the sponsors (WordPress.com and Jetpack supported the event as Super Admin sponsors), the first presentations started right away.
In the very first presentation, Human Made founder Noel Tock discussed the important role of open-source software in humanitarian challenges. He currently lives in Kharkiv, Ukraine where his charity helps evacuate dogs from the frontlines.
Tock explained how WordPress, open-source software, and global collaboration have played a significant role in past crises:
In short, the open-source ethos helps people find each other, have a voice, and work together. At the same time, they stay available when proprietary solutions close up to de-risk themselves.
The important role WordPress plays in Ukraine is best exemplified by comparing the number of global new WordPress sites per quarter to new Ukrainian sites based on WordPress.
Furthermore, half of Forbes’ top 50 Ukrainian charities are on WordPress and the platform has enabled them to raise more than half a billion dollars in donations in one year.
These charities include:
According to Tock, WordPress provides a mature and stable starting point for anyone to begin working and publishing online. Through that, it helps create real human outcomes.
If you contribute to WordPress, this is where your efforts go and where they make a difference. Keep that in mind. As Noel said, “you should all be incredibly proud of your work.”
The Internet has an enormous environmental footprint. Information and communication technology (ICT) was responsible for 10% of electricity consumption in 2023. Charlotte Bax, a sustainable web designer at Digihobbit, focused her presentation on what website owners can do to mitigate that.
Websites create emissions both from server-side processing (data traffic) and client side processing (rendering websites in the browser). The open-source sustainable web design model provides a digital carbon rating scale to estimate the impact of individual websites.
The short version is that, if you want a page to be rated A+ to B, it needs to be smaller than 1MB.
Use these tools to understand where your website stands:
Besides testing, there are concrete steps you can take to improve your website’s carbon footprint:
If you’re interested in this topic, Charlotte also recommended this 2022 WordCamp Nederland talk from Joost de Valk.
Google developer relations engineer Adam Silverstein used his presentation at WordCamp Europe 2025 to report on new features already available or coming soon to Baseline.
In case you don’t know, Baseline is an initiative started by the Google Chrome team to share information about which web platform features are supported by all browsers. This includes features and technologies you can use on all websites, including sites built with WordPress.
Some of the examples below are not yet part of Baseline but likely coming soon. If you want to know what web platform features are currently being worked on and their state of implementation, visit the Interop Project.
All the following features are native browser functionality and CSS driven without the need for JavaScript:
Want to see in-progress demos of the features Adam shared? Watch his video or check out his presentation slides.
The next set of features are aimed to make the user experience better:
The following features open up website experiences that weren’t possible before:
Héctor de Prada, a meetup organizer in León, Spain, a city with just 120,000 inhabitants, shared how his city runs one of the most well-attended WordPress meetup groups in the world:
What’s even more impressive? This meetup had been abandoned for three years and used to only attract around 15 people per meeting. Here’s how they turned it around:
Come to WordCamps, go to meetups, learn what the community is like and how these meetings are supposed to feel. This also helps meet potential sponsors, mentors, and speakers.
Don’t do it by yourself, but with a team. Try to find people with complementary skills and who are motivated and committed. Divide responsibilities among the team, that way, nobody is indispensable. Rotate responsibilities, so if one person is missing, the meetup can still happen.
One of the hardest things is to get a venue. In León they have always managed to get free space from the city, universities, or private companies. Reach out to universities and schools to get young people to the meetups, but reach out to the teachers, not the students directly. In addition, do collaborations with business organizations, content partners, and media.
Try to land both a local sponsor and WordPress community sponsors, there are many companies looking to support events. Make good use of the money and invest it in food, it’s what everyone wants.
Don’t only make the meetings about WordPress. WordPress covers so much of the digital world, you can pretty much talk about anything. Know your audience and what they want. Include talks that allow people to both learn and be inspired. In addition, cover trending topics.
Make sure you feature interesting talks and cultivate a casual vibe. Offer food and drinks to make networking easier.
There are 660 active meetup groups in the world. Find yours or organize the next one!
Jason Mayes, Web AI lead at Google, explained how to run machine learning models in the browser to allow “agentic behavior” while interacting with web applications. He predicts that this will be the future of the internet.
An agent is a system that autonomously performs tasks on behalf of the user. It’s basically one or more large language models (LLMs) with access to tools that allow it to complete its objective.
A tool can be a function, an API, or another source of data. They can be available directly on a website or application or outside of it.
Thanks to the underlying models, agents can:
They can do all of the above without the need for human intervention and, if needed, can repeat the cycle as often as necessary.
In the future, you will be able to talk to a website naturally through an AI running in your browser in order to achieve your objectives. You don’t have to learn a new user interface of each site, it all happens through an agent. Here’s a video of the example travel site from the presentation:
This may become the new SEO. Websites will likely contain a file that tells agents exactly what users can do there so they can achieve it faster. Websites that aren’t AI compatible may have a hard time competing on the web.
For this to work, a website has to make the necessary information available to the agent. Because it’s based on JavaScript, you can use website functions you’ve already written and existing logic. There’s a detailed data-flow diagram and explanation in the video of the talk.
Agents run locally on the machine of the user. As a consequence, they are more privacy-friendly than cloud AI. As hardware improves, more and better models will become available. Plus, browsers may already contain their own models—Chrome is already working on this.
It’s the start of a new era, an agentic internet. Start exploring it today.
No recap of WordCamp Europe 2025 would be complete without the traditional Q&A with Automattic CEO and WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg. He was joined by WordPress Executive Director Mary Hubbard.
The lively discussion addressed both prepared topics from the organizer crew as well as live questions from the audience, among them:
Two important announcements were made during the session: the launch of WordPress Campus Connect and the establishment of the WordPress AI team.
WordPress Campus Connect is a global community program that aims to help students learn about WordPress and its many possibilities through workshops, classes, and training. The program will launch a pilot project in collaboration with the University of Pisa on June 25, 2025. In it, 5000 students will do 150 contribution hours to the WordPress project worth six credits to graduate college.
This opens up great opportunities to bring younger people on board, provide mentorship and internships, foster new ideas, rejuvenate WordCamp demographics, and win long-term members of the WordPress community. It’s also very scalable, with opportunities to expand the program to other majors and universities.
The WordPress project recently established an AI team. One of the things the team will figure out is where to apply its initial efforts. AI is already being used to automate testing for the plugin directory.
Aside from that, it’s hard to imagine a screen in WordPress that couldn’t be enhanced with AI:
In addition, it’s great for developer productivity and project administration. We’re also seeing a lot of hosting providers integrating AI, such as the WordPress.com AI Website Builder.
The influx of AI plugins in the WordPress directory is also huge. A search for “AI” already turns up more than 1500 results. What’s helped is that the plugin review team has cut down the approval backlog. It’s now at about a week instead of six to eight months. As a consequence, plugin submissions have doubled since last year.
Generally, AI represents a major revolution. And we are just at the beginning. Matt called the current state of AI its “command-line phase.” Other ways of interacting with it are already on the way, including hardware versions such as wearables or materialized AI like robots and self-driving cars.
WordCamp Europe 2025 was a success and I had a blast as a visitor—just like every year. If you’ve never been to a WordCamp before, it’s one of the best ways to meet other people from the community, make friends, and learn.
If you are interested in joining, you can find all the info at WordCamp Central. Besides the flagship events, there are also many meetups and smaller camps happening all the time. They’re a great first step. Hope to see you at one of them!
The Laravel Taxonomy package manages categories, tags, and hierarchical structures in Laravel applications. Taxonomy is ideal for category management, organizing content, product attributes, and more.
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Read more https://build.prestashop-project.org/news/2025/Dominik-Shaim-Ulrich-contributing-locally/
The Laravel team released v12.18.0, with encrypt and decrypt string helpers, per-request truncation limit for HTTP client responses, a new command option to make batchable jobs, and more.
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WordPress.com’s parent company, Automattic, has partnered with Out in Tech, the world’s largest community of LGBTQ+ tech leaders and professionals, since 2017. We’re proud to have helped build over 250 websites for nonprofit organizations that support and advocate for LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.
Just in time for Pride Month 2025, a small group of Automatticians, including me, participated in the Out in Tech Digital Corps Hackathon, held in our office in New York City a few weeks ago.
During a Digital Corps Hackathon, groups with 8-10 volunteers spend the day building a full, multilingual website for the nonprofit to which they’re assigned. My group was assigned a youth advocacy group in West Africa.
A few days before the event, we were added to a shared Google Drive and a dedicated Slack channel, giving us a clear picture of what would be needed before we even arrived. We even connected with the organization’s executive director over video early on the day of the Hackathon.
My group consisted of UX designers, illustrators, marketers, digital strategists, copywriters, and expert site builders. Honestly, I felt like I was back in college working feverishly on a class assignment, and I loved every minute of it. The camaraderie, intense collaboration, and our shared sense of mission all contributed to a joyful experience, complete with inside jokes and new friendships.
At the end of the day, each group presented their finished website during the closing showcase, and then we celebrated with snacks and lively conversations. By the time I’d left later that evening, I’d already made a mental note to volunteer for the next Hackathon in September. It’s incredibly meaningful to use our skills to amplify the missions of LGBTQ+ organizations worldwide.
Interested in volunteering or learning more about Out in Tech? Head to their website to find out how you can get involved and attend an event near you.
Read more https://wordpress.com/blog/2025/06/10/out-in-tech-may-2025/