WordPress.org published the full WordCamp Europe 2026 program this week: Kraków, June 4 to 6, two keynotes plus workshops and themed tracks. Most people will pick sessions and plan to take notes. I’d use it as a prep list instead. A session sticks when you’ve already hit the problem it describes, and half the talks here name problems you can reproduce on staging in an evening.
The headline items are an opening keynote from two CERN people about moving more than 800 websites onto a customized WordPress Service, a closing keynote from Matt Mullenweg, and a livestream for every session. I’d plan the trip around that livestream more than around any single talk.
Two sessions worth doing homework for
The developer track has two sessions where an hour of homework pays off. One is Anukasha Singh’s talk on smarter plugin permissions with the Abilities API. The Abilities API shipped in WordPress 6.9, and per the developer handbook it lets plugins register units of functionality with declared inputs, outputs and permission checks. An AI agent or an automation tool ends up calling exactly that. Walk in cold and you’ll mostly hear concepts. Register one ability beforehand and you’ll show up with real questions.
The handbook example takes about ten minutes on a staging site:
add_action( 'wp_abilities_api_init', function () {
wp_register_ability( array(
'name' => 'bbioon/export-order-report',
'label' => 'Export order report',
'category' => 'tools',
'input_schema' => array(
'type' => 'object',
'properties' => array(
'month' => array( 'type' => 'string' ),
),
),
'permission_callback' => function () {
return current_user_can( 'view_woocommerce_reports' );
},
'execute_callback' => function ( $input ) {
return array(
'success' => true,
'month' => $input['month'] ?? '',
);
},
) );
} );Experiment with the permission callback before the talk. Mine uses view_woocommerce_reports, which exists on WooCommerce sites, and the capability you pick decides who can trigger the ability from the REST route or an MCP client. If you bring an example that doesn’t work, the Q&A can turn into an actual code review.
The other session is the panel on the inside of WordPress 7.0. That release shipped in the same month this program was announced, so the panel looks back at a release rather than previewing one. The prep is what your clients need anyway: clone a production site to staging, run the upgrade, write down the first thing that breaks. I’ve already written about contributor day landing on the 7.0 release, and the same habit helps here, because you arrive with a specific question for the contributors in the room.
The CERN keynote is about governance
The CERN talk will probably get billed as an enterprise adoption story. I think 800-plus websites on a shared, customized service is mostly a governance problem. Who approves plugins across that many sites, how do updates roll out, what happens to legacy content, and who owns a site a department abandoned years ago? A small agency runs into the same questions at 30 client sites.
If you maintain a fleet of sites, or a chain of WooCommerce stores on shared infrastructure, listen for the governance details and not the CERN name. I don’t know how much depth an opening keynote can hold, but even a summary of how they staged a migration that size beats most migration talks I’ve sat through, and with the livestream you don’t need a ticket for it.
What I’d skip and what I’d watch from home
Panels don’t work well on video, so the future-of-SEO and rethinking-learning panels go on my watch-later list unless I happen to be near the room. I’d go to the agentic AI talk with modest expectations. Moving from prompts to tools and systems is the pitch every AI vendor ran this year, and a WordPress-specific version needs to show real tool calls to justify the slot.
The search track turned out more useful than I expected. The session on whether you need an SEO or GEO plugin at all is a conversation most of us are already having with clients, and the one on AI search is aimed at the people who sign off on budgets, not the people writing code. Send both links to clients who ask why traffic moved. I did the same filtering for WordCamp Asia earlier this year, and skipping tracks on purpose is the only way I get through two conference days. If you’re going in person, mark up the full WCEU schedule now, and Contributor Day on the fourth is worth more than any single session.
If you want the pre-event work done properly, I can register abilities for your plugin or store, run the 7.0 compatibility pass on staging, and hand you a short list of fixes before your clients upgrade. It’s easier to do that now than in the week after the event.
One concrete step before June: register a single ability on staging and run the 7.0 upgrade on a copy of a real site. Each takes under an hour.
