Sessions

We used to think the hard part of digital work was consistency: building reusable components, scalable systems, and reliable patterns that teams could ship quickly and safely.

Today, modern tooling has made production almost too easy, generating interfaces, layouts, and variations almost as fast as we can think of them.
The harder problem is what we optimized away in the process: intent.
As systems scale and tooling matures, it becomes easier to move fast without asking whether we’re still solving the right problem. Our components and tokens may remain visually coherent, but drift emerges at the level of meaning, purpose, and direction.

In this talk, we’ll discuss how design systems must evolve from static libraries into living feedback systems, shaped as much by governance, communication, and organizational learning as by tokens or components. We’ll look at how intent gets lost at scale, why “doing the thing right” is not the same as “doing the right thing” and what it means to build stewardship practices that help teams notice and correct drift over time.

Attendees will leave with a different way of thinking about design systems: not just as tools for consistency, but as infrastructure for ongoing decision-making in complex, changing environments.

Every few years, something new shows up at your WordPress site that isn’t a person. Search engines, mobile browsers, social platforms — each time, the ecosystem adapted. But those were one-way streets: your site pushed content out to be indexed or previewed, and that was the end of the conversation.

Agentic commerce flips the script. The buyer’s AI agent never opens a browser, never sees a checkout page, never clicks “Pay” — yet the transactional plumbing still has to work. For the first time at real scale, your store isn’t just sending data out, it’s taking instructions back. An AI agent submits a cart, requests a price calculation, initiates a payment — and your store has to accept, validate, and follow through, with real money on the line.

That raises the same trust question that comes up every time a new commerce channel emerges: when there’s no UI, where does trust live? The answer, as it’s always been, is infrastructure — trusted payment providers, buyer protection, and fraud detection doing the heavy lifting, just as they did when people were first nervous about typing a credit card into a website.

This talk explores what it looks like to build for that reality — walking through real implementations using custom REST endpoints in WooCommerce payment plugins, as a first step toward open agentic commerce, where any AI agent can walk up to any WooCommerce store and complete a transaction.

AI Search isn’t just SEO’s problem anymore – it’s everyone’s. From content teams to developers, PPC to partnerships, the shift to AI-native discovery affects your entire business. This session is your wake-up call: why you’re probably already behind, what’s changed, and the quick wins you can implement now to catch up.

Every WordPress agency lives or dies by the next contract. Outreach, follow-ups, qualification, proposals. They sit on the founder’s desk and have done so for as long as agencies have existed.

That part is changing first. AI agents now run entire pieces of the sales process on their own, without supervision.

In this session, I share examples from my own work and how I automate my processes and standards with AI agents. What runs reliably in production and what fails, with a path you can follow without losing your voice.

[Joint presentation by the Agency Project Manager and Tech Lead, and the Client.]

What happens when you hand a global industrial manufacturer’s website over to an AI and ask it to speak fluent German, Japanese, and beyond, all within WordPress? This session is a candid, data-driven deep dive into a real-world project for Standex Electronics, a precision engineering company operating across multiple international markets. We focus on integrating OpenAI’s translation capabilities into a multilingual WordPress multisite. We’ll walk you through exactly why the team chose to explore AI translation as a serious contender alongside well-known tools, and what the architecture of that decision actually looked like in production.

We put the tools head-to-head, and we’ll share accuracy benchmarks comparing OpenAI against well-known translation platforms. The things that surprised us, the ones that didn’t, and the meaningful gaps that only revealed themselves when native speaking colleagues, not developers, were the target audience. Industrial and technical language is its own dialect, and machine learning doesn’t always get the memo. We’ll share a collection of our favourite “technically correct, and completely wrong” translations – the moments where a direct translation produced something that ranged from mildly confusing to a genuinely hilarious problem, and what each tool revealed about the difference between translating words and translating intent.

Beyond the laughs, we’ll get into the operational reality: how long it actually takes to push translation updates, run human review cycles, and maintain consistency across a multisite at scale. We’ll share honest timings from the Standex project, from content change to live translated page, you’ll also hear how OpenAI was woven directly into a leading multilingual WordPress content management workflow, the integration decisions made along the way, and what the team would do differently if starting from scratch today.

This session is presented by three people who lived it together: the Project Manager, the Developer who built the integration, and the client from Standex Electronics who commissioned it and trusted the output. They have the kind of candid working relationship that makes for an honest conversation – the kind you don’t usually get at a conference. Whether you’re a developer scoping a multilingual build, a project manager navigating client expectations around AI, or a digital leader wondering whether machine translation is ready for your audience, this session will give you the real picture, stats, stumbles, and all.

AI is now embedded in plugins, themes, content pipelines, and client sites across the WordPress ecosystem. Most WordPress professionals have focused on what AI can do. Almost nobody has focused on what it requires of you legally

This talk covers the compliance gap that agencies, freelancers, and product builders are about to run into: GDPR and data residency implications of AI tools processing user content, consent requirements when AI is involved in personalization or communication, the EU AI Act and what it means for WordPress businesses serving European clients, and disclosure obligations that are already in effect in some jurisdictions.

These are not hypothetical future risks. They are current, and the WordPress ecosystem is largely unprepared for them.

Attendees will leave with a practical checklist for auditing their own sites and client sites, an understanding of which AI use cases carry the most legal exposure, and clarity on what questions to bring to their legal counsel.

Earlier this year I was the sole developer on a new WordPress site build. AI tools moved the work along, but only because I spent the project teaching them how to work in my way – correcting mistakes, capturing what I learned, and feeding it back so they wouldn’t repeat them over and over again.

This talk is about that practice: teaching your AI tools your process as you go, so they get better instead of just faster.

Two actual instances from the project as examples:

1. A mega-menu nav with a dead click zone where the AI’s first move was a complicated JavaScript event handler – the actual fix was a few CSS utility classes on the link.
2. A tangled Tailwind class string that smelled wrong before I could name why – four AI agents running in parallel helped me diagnose it, clean it, and codify a rule that’s held up since.

What I’ve learned and my process improvements go beyond just writing code:

1. Asking for HTML output instead of markdown when richer visualizations are helpful.
2. Dispatching multiple models to get different viewpoints for comparison and brainstorming solutions.
3. Keeping the lessons I’ve taught the tools portable so I don’t lose the learning when I migrate to a new model.

My processes are still evolving and improving. This talk gives a snapshot of where I’m at now and attendees will leave with a new set of tools and perspectives to improve their own AI interactions, grounded in actual project work on a shipped site.

Hook: Every dev on your team has their own pile of AI prompts and one-off scripts — which means every hard-won lesson stays trapped with the person who learned it, and the rest of the team keeps paying to learn it again. What if your team’s AI tooling lived in a versioned, reviewed, CI-enforced repo — the same way your plugins do? Take-away: a concrete starter pattern for a team-skills repo + the three policies that make it stick.

Accessibility in WordPress is often misunderstood as something that can be solved by simply installing a plugin. While plugins can be helpful, true accessibility requires understanding how themes, content, design choices, navigation, forms, images, headings, and interactive elements affect real users.

In this session, I will explain what real WordPress accessibility looks like beyond automated tools and quick fixes. Attendees will learn common accessibility issues found on WordPress websites, how to identify them, and practical steps they can take to make their sites more usable and compliant with WCAG and Section 508 standards.

This presentation is designed for WordPress site owners, designers, developers, content creators, and anyone who wants to build websites that work better for everyone.