fidzu : WordPress

WordCamp Asia 2026 brought the global WordPress community to Mumbai, India, from April 9-11, gathering contributors, organizers, sponsors, speakers, and attendees at the Jio World Convention Centre for three days of learning, collaboration, and community. With 2,281 attendees, the event reflected the scale of the WordPress community and the strong turnout throughout the event.

The event unfolded across Contributor Day and two conference days, with a program that moved from technical sessions and workshops to hallway conversations, shared meals, and joyful moments of connection across the venue. From first-time attendees to longtime contributors, WordCamp Asia 2026 reflected the breadth of the WordPress ecosystem and the many ways people shaped and sustained it.

Throughout the event, WordCamp Asia 2026 balanced formal programming with the conversations happening around it. Sessions and workshops set the pace, while morning networking, tea breaks, lunch, the family photo, the sponsor's raffle, and the after party in Jasmine Hall helped make the event feel welcoming, social, and connected.

How WordCamp Asia 2026 Took Shape

Bringing together contribution, practical learning, and forward-looking conversation in one shared program. Across Contributor Day and the conference sessions that followed, attendees moved between hands-on work, technical talks, workshops, and broader discussions about AI, education, enterprise, community growth, and the open web.

The result was a WordCamp that felt expansive without losing its sense of connection. Different rooms with topics as themes, helping different audiences, and different forms of participation all fed into the same larger picture: a community actively building what comes next for WordPress as a feeling that something bigger was happening: not just a schedule being delivered, but a community showing up for one another and for the future of WordPress.

Contributor Day: Building WordPress Together

Contributor Day opened WordCamp Asia 2026 with one of the clearest expressions of what makes the project special: people coming together to move WordPress forward by working on it. More than 1,500 participants joined 38 table leads across more than 20 contribution tables, creating a day that was expansive in scale and grounded in real work. For some, it was a return to familiar teams and longtime collaborators. For others, it was the beginning of their contributor journey.

The day moved between structured learning and hands-on participation. Alongside contributor sessions, attendees joined workshops, visited the Open Source Library, took part in YouthCamp, and attended The Making of a WordPress Release: Conversations with Past Release Squad Members, a featured panel that added depth and perspective to the work of building and sustaining WordPress.

What made Contributor Day stand out was not only the number of people in the room, but the range of ways they could take part. Workshops created space for skill-building. YouthCamp brought younger participants into the experience and widened the event's reach in a meaningful way. The day felt welcoming, energetic, and full of possibility.

By the end, the impact was already visible across teams. Polyglots contributors suggested more than 7,000 strings and reviewed 3,200 of them. Photo contributors uploaded 76 images. The Test team worked on more than 20 tickets, and 55 contributors joined Training. Those numbers told only part of the story, but they pointed to what Contributor Day continued to do so well: turn a large gathering into shared work that strengthened the project in real time.

Conference Sessions Take Shape

Across the conference days, WordCamp Asia 2026 covered a wide range of topics, from technical development and hands-on workshops to business strategy and the open web. Sessions took place across the Foundation, Growth, and Enterprise tracks, with workshops running alongside the main program.

One of the opening sessions was James LePage's WordPress and AI, which introduced a theme that appeared throughout the conference: how WordPress is responding to changes in AI, publishing, and developer workflows. That topic continued in later sessions focused on AI-driven development, autonomous testing, plugin maintenance, and automation.

Later that morning, a fireside chat with Mary Hubbard and Shilpa Shah shifted the focus toward trust, security, and the longer-term questions shaping open source publishing. Coming early in the program, the conversation gave the conference an important center of gravity, pairing technical change with questions of stewardship, resilience, and what people needed from WordPress as the web continued to evolve. Rather than pulling away from the event's technical momentum, it deepened it, bringing a human perspective to the pace of change and reminding the audience that progress in open source is not only about what gets built, but about how communities guide, challenge, and sustain that work over time.

From there, the conference widened into a program that balanced developer-focused talks with sessions on the Interactivity API, the HTML API, AI-driven development workflows, education initiatives, observability, automation, and startup strategy. On the final day, those threads continued through talks on WP translation, community building, WordPress Playground, data engineering, enterprise WordPress, and journalism on the open web.

Together, the two conference days made clear that WordCamp Asia 2026 was designed not for one kind of attendee, but for many. Developers, founders, marketers, contributors, organizers, and people finding their place in WordPress for the first time all found something that spoke directly to their work and interests. The breadth of the program was striking, but so was the feeling that these conversations mattered now.

Building What Comes Next

WordCamp Asia 2026 closed with reflections from Mary Hubbard, following an opening announcement from Chenda Ngak that WordCamp India will join the calendar in 2027 as the fourth flagship WordPress event.

Mary's remarks tied together several threads that had already surfaced throughout the event: India's long-standing role in the WordPress project, the growth of programs like Campus Connect and WordPress Credits, the energy of YouthCamp, and the significance of WordPress 7.0. One of the clearest ideas in the session was that WordPress is entering a new phase shaped by real-time collaboration, AI infrastructure, and global contributor growth. That framing gave the closing session a strong sense of direction without losing sight of the community work that made it possible.

The session then shifted into a panel discussion about the current state of WordPress and where the project is headed next. Peter Wilson and Sergey Biryukov joined Hubbard on stage, while audience questions brought the conversation back to many of the themes that had shaped the event across all three days. Even from afar, Ma.tt Mullenweg remained part of the discussion, following along remotely and sending written responses during the live Q&A.

Those questions touched on contributor growth, AI, plugins, local communities, product direction, and the long-term health of the open web. What stood out was how often the answers returned to the same core idea: WordPress continues to grow through open discussion, shared responsibility, and the people who keep showing up to build it together.

A Lasting Momentum

Over three days in Mumbai, WordCamp Asia 2026 brought together contribution, learning, and community. From Contributor Day through the closing keynote, the event balanced hands-on work with bigger conversations about publishing, technology, education, and the open web.

The event also created space for many kinds of participation. Some attendees contributed to Core, Training, Polyglots, Photos, and other teams. Others came for the conference program, workshops, or the chance to reconnect with collaborators and meet new people. Across session rooms, tea breaks, shared meals, sponsor hall conversations, and the after party, the community side of the event remained just as important as the formal program.

Thank you to the organizers, volunteers, speakers, sponsors, attendees, and everyone who joined online. WordCamp Asia 2026 was a reminder that WordPress continues to grow through the people who show up to contribute and build together.

There is still more to look forward to this year. The community will gather again at WordCamp Europe 2026 in Kraków, Poland from June 4-6, followed by WordCamp US 2026 in Phoenix, Arizona from August 16-19.

11 Apr 2026 6:21pm GMT

AI is revolutionizing release communication for open source projects by automating updates, enhancing clarity, and maintaining human oversight, ensuring effective information delivery.

10 Apr 2026 8:47am GMT

I've been taking an iterative approach to building Claudaborative Editing: build something to prove that the underlying concept works, then evolve on top of that. The first two iterations were answering a question I had: can an LLM genuinely improve the writing process? Along the way, I found a more important question: can it be done without contributing to the masses of generated slop we see?

Having seen the underlying idea working, I needed to answer the next question: can it be brought into the actual writing environment? Can it be useful, but keep out of the way?

Can you talk to an LLM from within WordPress, and have it talk back? I think I'm onto something, and it's alot of fun.

Coming to a WordPress Near You

Naturally, the next step was to build a WordPress plugin that provided a straightforward interface to the LLM backend. You still install the tool to run with your local copy of Claude Code, but once it's running, you can do everything directly from the block editor. The plugin is waiting to be approved for the WordPress.org plugin directory, but you can download it directly from the GitHub repo now.

Tools are easily accessible when you need them, but otherwise stay out of your way. You choose how much input you want the LLM to have in your writing: it can fix things up for you, or you can ask it to just leave notes and you'll decide how you want to proceed. Personally, I prefer to do the work myself, but everyone can choose their level of comfort.

That said, one of the things I often forget to do when writing a post is to tag it properly. If I do remember, I'm never sure what to tag it with. By the time I get to publishing, I'm impatient just to get it out in the world! So, now there's a button that'll give suggestions right before publishing, letting you pick and choose which suggestions to use, and what to drop.

Planning is a Conversation

I always start Claude Code in planning mode, and I wanted that for posts, too. That's where I started this post, and I can absolutely see myself using this every time I need to write a post. Not to do the writing for me, but to help me organise my thoughts. I opened the Compose mode in the sidebar, I had it summarise the changes that I've made in the last 2 weeks, and present a few options for how to collate them. Some I kept, some I dropped.

In a lot of ways, it's more like a very advanced ELIZA, though rather than just reflecting your words back, it reflects your ideas back in a more structured form.

What's next

I'll be honest, I'm really happy with how this has turned out so far! I'd love to hear your feedback as you use it. What would you like to see here? I've already noted down a bunch of ideas that came up just while I was writing this post, so there are definitely more things to come!

Go ahead and give it a shot now:

npx claudaborative-editing start

10 Apr 2026 5:40am GMT

In this episode, Adam Weeks and Carrie Smaha discuss agency partner programs, emphasizing ongoing commissions, risk management, and building trust.

09 Apr 2026 10:33am GMT

Loading all available tools into an LLM's context simultaneously is one of the most consequential architectural mistakes teams make when building AI integrations. The solution isn't bigger context windows, and it's progressive tool exposure: dynamically presenting only the tools relevant to each interaction. This post surveys the major patterns for doing so, drawn from production servers, […]

09 Apr 2026 5:04am GMT

I wanted to hook up Claude Code to be able to interact with my local wordpress-develop core development environment via MCP (Model Context Protocol). I couldn't find documentation specifically for doing this, so I'm sharing how I did it here.

Assuming you have set up the environment (with Docker) and started it via npm run env:start.

1. Install & Activate the MCP Adapter plugin

The MCP adapter is not currently available as a plugin to install from the plugin directory. You instead have to obtain it from GitHub and install it from the command line. I installed it as a plugin instead of as a Composer package:

cd src/wp-content/plugins
git clone https://github.com/WordPress/mcp-adapter
cd mcp-adapter
composer install

Next, activate the plugin. Naturally, you can also just activate the "MCP Adapter" plugin from the WP admin. You can also activate it via WP-CLI (but from the project root working directory, since you can't run this command from inside of the mcp-adapter directory:

npm run env:cli -- plugin activate mcp-adapter

2. Register the MCP server with Claude

Here's the command I used to register the wordpress-develop MCP server with Claude:

claude mcp add-json wordpress-develop --scope user '{"command":"npm", "args":["--prefix", "~/repos/wordpress-develop/", "run", "env:cli", "--", "mcp-adapter", "serve", "--server=mcp-adapter-default-server", "--user=admin"]}'

Here's the JSON with formatting:

{
        "command": "npm",
        "args": [
                "--prefix",
                "~/repos/wordpress-develop/",
                "run",
                "env:cli",
                "--",
                "mcp-adapter",
                "serve",
                "--server=mcp-adapter-default-server",
                "--user=admin"
        ]
}

You may want to remove --scope user if you just want to register the MCP server for the one project. I tend to re-use the same WP environment for multiple projects (core and plugins), so I think it may make it easier for me to install at the user level instead.

You will also need to change the --prefix arg's ~/repos/wordpress-develop/ value to correspond to where the repo is actually cloned on your system. I include this arg here so that when I start claude inside of a plugin project (e.g. inside src/wp-content/plugins/performance), it is able to successfully run the npm command in the package.json in the ancestor directory. You can remove this --prefix arg if this is not relevant to you.

Change the user from admin according to your needs.

3. Expose all abilities to MCP

Registered abilities are not exposed to MCP by default. This is a safety measure so that AI agents have to be explicitly allowed to perform potentially sensitive actions. So without any plugins active other than the MCP Adapter, prompting Claude with "discover abilities" results in:

No abilities found. The MCP server connection may be unstable. Try reconnecting again with /mcp.

However, since this is a local development environment, there is no concern about this (for me at least). To opt in all abilities to be exposed to MCP by default, you can use the following plugin code:

add_filter(
        'wp_register_ability_args',
        static function ( array $args, string $ability_id ): array {
                if (
                        // Prevent exposing abilities in MCP except on a local dev environment.
                        wp_get_environment_type() === 'local'
                        &&
                        // Omit abilities which the MCP Adapter already makes available itself.
                        ! str_starts_with( $ability_id, 'mcp-adapter/' )
                ) {
                        $args['meta']['mcp']['public'] = true;
                }
                return $args;
        },
        10,
        2
);

This is also available in a gist to facilitate installation via Git Updater.

Note: This filter does not currently apply if your ability is registered by extending Abstract_Ability in the AI plugin.

At this point, I can now open Claude (or re-connect to the MCP server) and see that it is able to see all (er, most) abilities that are registered on my wordpress-develop env with the same prompt "discover abilities":

3 WordPress abilities available:

core/get-environment-info - Returns runtime context (PHP, database, WordPress version) with the ability name.

core/get-site-info - Returns site information (all fields or filtered subset)

core/get-user-info - Returns current user profile details

When I prompt "what's the environment info?" it executes the core/get-environment-info ability via MCP and prints out:

• Environment: local
• PHP Version: 8.3.26
• Database Server: 8.4.8 (MySQL)
• WordPress Version: 7.1-alpha-62161-src

Now the environment just needs more abilities! I've filed a Performance Lab issue for us at the Core Performance table to work on adding abilities during Contributor Day at WordCamp Asia tomorrow.

---

Where I've shared this:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Bluesky
• Threads
• Mastodon

The post Adding an MCP Server to the WordPress Core Development Environment appeared first on Weston Ruter.

08 Apr 2026 6:41pm GMT

Matthias Pfefferle and Ryan Barrett discuss the Indie Web's dual nature as both a philosophy and a protocol, emphasizing website ownership and the role of open standards like RSS.

08 Apr 2026 12:27pm GMT

In this episode, Adam Weeks discusses a partnership between Servebolt and Crowd Favorite, focusing on innovative enterprise solutions. The partnership aims to address complex technological challenges, enabling businesses to prioritize growth over maintenance.

08 Apr 2026 9:00am GMT

WordCamp Asia 2026 will be available to watch live across three days of streaming, making it easy for the global WordPress community to follow along from anywhere. This year's live streamed programming begins with a special Contributor Day broadcast, followed by two full conference days of presentations from across the WordPress community.

This post gathers each official stream in one place so you can quickly find the right broadcast for each day. Bookmark this page and return throughout the event to watch live.

Day One: The Making of a WordPress Release

Go behind the scenes of a WordPress release in this special Contributor Day live stream from WordCamp Asia 2026. Past release squad members come together to share stories, reflect on their experience, and talk about what it takes to bring a WordPress release to life. The Panel will go live at 4:30 am UTC.

Day Two: Conference Livestreams

Watch the second day of WordCamp Asia 2026 live for a full day of presentations and sessions. beginning at 4:00 am UTC, including a Fireside chat with Mary Hubbard, which will begin at 5:00 am UTC over on the Growth Stream.

Day Three: Conference Livestreams

Watch the third day and final day of WordCamp Asia 2026 live, beginning at 4:00 am UTC for another full day of presentations from across the community. Don't forget to watch Ma.tt Mullenweg give the final keynote, which will begin on the Growth stream at 10:00 am UTC.

You can also explore the full schedule to see what is coming up across the event and plan your viewing. However you join, we hope you will follow along and be part of WordCamp Asia 2026.

07 Apr 2026 1:57pm GMT

In this episode, Anne Bovelett chats with Dr. Christian Kurze discuss strategies for startups in open source CMS, emphasizing structured sales and sustainable monetization.

07 Apr 2026 9:05am GMT

If you've been paying attention to LLM-based coding tools in the past few months, you'll have seen a seismic shift in how they're being used. Even 12 months ago, they were little more than glorified auto-complete tools: useful for quickly repeating patterns, but terrible at producing well structured, thoughtful, maintainable code. More recently, however, there seems to have been a new equilibrium reached, where an experienced engineer can guide these tools to consistently produce high quality code. Small course adjustments seem to have an outsized effect, resulting in the "Human in the Loop" paradigm that's become so popular.

Why It Works

"Code is Poetry" has been my approach to writing code for as long as I can remember. Software is a form of expression, and the way you create that expression is through code. So, to make beautiful software, you need to write beautiful code. But, what happens when you don't need to write code to create the software?

Suddenly, the code becomes entirely about outcomes. It needs to be correct, functional, and maintainable, but it doesn't need to be seen as a form of expression itself. Instead, the creative decisions move further up the stack, to the architectural level. You can write beautiful software by writing thoughtful specifications, instead.

That's not to say that technical abilities are suddenly obsolete. You still need to know what's possible and realistic to be able to tell the LLM what to build, and to redirect it when it goes in a different direction. You need to be able to read and comprehend the code, you just don't need to memorise every function signature.

The Temptation

So, if an LLM can write code for me, what else can it do? Marketing copy? Emails? Opinion blog posts? I could ask Claude to write 10 paragraphs on the "The Human in the Loop", but would you have even read this far if you thought this post was LLM generated? Of course not! I can promise you that every word of this post (and every other post on my blog) was written by me.

Respect for the Reader

If I want you to read this post, and seriously consider the arguments I'm making, the least I can do is write it myself. It goes beyond that, however. LLMs can write functional code, but they can't write beautiful software. When the text is the creative act, there's no way for the LLM to write the text without compromising your creativity. If you're the Human in the Loop for a blog post, you're not injecting your voice, your perspective, or your personality into the post: you're rubber stamping whatever feels good enough, and that's a very low bar to clear.

"Good enough" isn't actually good enough.

A measure of the complexity of a written piece of text is called "perplexity". It measures the randomness of how the text flows, and it's probably the thing you're noticing when you know you're reading LLM-generated text, but you can't quite articulate why. It's an uncanny valley thing: it looks like writing, it reads like writing, it might even flow like writing, but the vibes are off.

The good news is, you're not going insane, recent research shows that there is a measurable difference between human written text, and LLM generated text. LLM generated text is inherently less random, which makes sense when you remember that LLMs are, at their core, giant statistical models that are really good at figuring out "what's the most likely bit of text to come next".

The LLM as the Assistant

That's not to say that LLMs are completely useless when it comes to writing, but we need to use them the right way. While they shouldn't be generating text, they can absolutely be used to help you write. Over the last month or so, I've been working on Claudaborative Editing, an experiment to see exactly how much they can help with the writing process. I've been building it directly into the WordPress editor, allowing me to plan, write, review, and publish this post from the one place. An LLM assisted, but every word of it was written by me alone. My goal isn't to replace the author, or to make it easier to fill the web with LLM-generated dreck, it's to help me (and hopefully you, too!) improve your writing, while still keeping it fundamentally yours.

Where Does Creativity Live?

When you're evaluating these tools, "can an LLM do this?" isn't the question you need to ask. Instead, think about where the creative part of the process lives. For software, that's in the design decisions and the architecture, the final product is the expression of that creativity. The specifics of the implementation don't really matter. For a blog post, or any writing for that matter, the creativity lives in the act of writing. To delegate that to an LLM is to delegate your own creativity.

Here's what I believe: the best uses of LLM tools are when they augment humans, rather than try to replace them. They enhance the inherent creativity of their human operator, they don't suppress it.

This belief guides how I use LLMs, and how I build tools that help others use LLMs, too. I'll be pushing out a new release of Claudaborative Editing in the next few days, I hope you'll give it a go!

07 Apr 2026 6:38am GMT

It's very cool to see Theo / t3.gg's open source arc.

Just in general, with people creating more software than ever, it's so exciting to see an explosion of open source and a growing understanding of why working together on open source makes so much sense for the future we want to build.

07 Apr 2026 12:01am GMT

Conferences are hectic, but experts say taking breaks is key for success. Pausing helps recharge, absorb info, and connect meaningfully with others. Balance is everything!

06 Apr 2026 8:27am GMT

You call yourself a Christian engineer, but you haven't given your life to Open Source? Huh.

What license would Jesus choose? I don't know if it's GPL or MIT, but sure as heck it isn't proprietary.

Letting proprietary code dictate your life is like following a Bible you're not allowed to read. Beware those who would seek to mediate your relationship to the divine.

Happy Easter, y'all.

Update: BTW, the above would probably be a lot better if I spoke it, because people would hear a very humorous tone, but that's not clear from the text! So some have said I come off pretty jerky, and some said blasphemous. Fair! I'm also not saying it's literally funny, it just would be a little clearer I was trying.

Also, I mean examples as possible metaphors or parallels and not literally, but never say that up front. Also as thought experiment, not literally as judgey. "No" or "it is totally fine" are valid answers to the first question, lots of more possibilities - the "Huh" is meant more out of curiosity than judgment, a conversation starter, not an ender.

Finally the ender "Happy Easter, y'all)" in my Houston culture and context / the South would be pretty clear as actually happy, friendly and playful. But said in a different tone or without that context, the opposite! I have friends in NYC for whom that would read deep sarcasm, a big FU and rude bye. I didn't think of that!

Anyway, I've learned a lot from the feedback, will probably still learn more, and want to deeply appreciate the people who care enough to give it to me and spend time explaining and answering my questions. Thanks, y'all! (Not sarcastic <- Real smiles and gratitude, not smug.)

I'm not thanking all the Twitter / X trolls, though, and I'm not going to engage any more because the real or perceived trolling makes it almost impossible to change, nor do I harbor any illusions of changing some minds. I've devoted hundreds of hours to it in the past, but it didn't help, and that took a lot of time away from my favorite people and loved ones.

(Also, I think something has changed; in open source and WordPress, we'd fight like crazy, but ended up coming together or having a meal afterward before diving back in. Social media I think has made that rarer and harder.)

(and the new Spring colors are on the site.)

05 Apr 2026 3:40pm GMT

If you're looking for a good watch this weekend, I couldn't recommend more the documentary Turn Every Page - The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb. The craft of research, writing, and editing is presented in the most beautiful way possible. Around 400,000 words were removed from The Power Broker, which was ultimately published as 1,162 pages.

05 Apr 2026 1:14am GMT

This Ashlee Vance interview of Pedro Franceschi from Brex contains so many interesting stories it might cause you to reconsider what it means to be a CEO.

03 Apr 2026 7:07pm GMT