It was my first time attending a flagship event by WordPress, and the way it was organized and how they welcomed us was unimaginable. The registration process went really smoothly via the QR code they had generated in advance—it was like scan, print your ID, and go. The swag bag contained some nice stickers; I honestly still haven’t gone through them. These things made the start just better 🙂
The first day (for me—otherwise they had a Contributors Day before it, which I heard was a blast), the session that really caught my attention was by Nirav Mehta — “Lost & Found in AI Wonderland: An Honest Journey Through Hype, Headaches, and Real Wins.”
It was interesting to understand the hype around AI and how it’s impacting us. He beautifully showcased what has happened in the past with similar hype cycles, what’s happening now, and probably what’s going to happen next. He also introduced us to the scope of learning in this space and emphasized that the ones who keep learning will win this race.
After the session we went to the Sponsors room, where the most interesting conversation happened with the Hostinger (this site is also hosted by them) team on How they are partner of Drupal and yet have the gap in Workflow. For which they took the suggestion very positively and took the feedback on spot, I hope to see the suggested features in work soon 🙂
And then met the Event Manager person from Google, wanted to meet the tech team but they were unavailable at that time
Now let’s get to the #Day2, I was using WordPress blocks from sometime and there are some bottlenecks which I faced was there cause I was not aware about the capability of WordPress at full scale.
That’s when I attended a session by JC Palmes — “From Chaos to Clarity: Scaling Teams with Block Theme Standards.” From this, I not only learned how to use blocks to their full potential, but the open-source theme she showcased also caught my attention.
It had features like a built-in script for running Lighthouse, which is something I’d love to adopt in Drupal projects. After every release, clients usually ask, “How’s the performance looking?”—and right now, that ends up being a manual effort for the QA team, or at least requires someone to trigger it locally and wait for the reports.
Another feature was an integrated A11y script that provides accessibility audit reports on the go. I still need to explore how this library works.
And still have to explore more in that theme. If you like to explore as well, check it out at https://github.com/WebDevStudios/wds-bt
During the event I got the chance to meet the – OG of Wapuu – Kazuko Kaneuchi
And honestly if I had to choose the one wapuu from her initial draft, I would have gone with below one because I can relate with this fella.
OG of Contact Form 7 – Takayuki Miyoshi
I asked him how he got the idea of creating a plug-and-play form, especially since we’ve always had custom solutions available. That’s when he told me it came from a client requirement, which made him wonder why nothing like this already existed.
That really got me thinking—there are several solutions I’ve built for my clients that could be useful for others too. Now I’m considering rewriting those solutions as plug-and-play modules as well.
And now few shots from #WordCampAsia2026
