WordCamp US, 2026

WordCamp US was in Phoenix, Arizona this year. In August. Many people were quite wary of the heat, and I know people that didn’t even go because of it. Read below for my opinion about it.

Sponsorship

I want to start by saying thanks to xCloud Hosting for sponsoring me to WordCamp, I couldn’t have gone without them. I got 4 cool xCloud t-shirts and wore them at the event, and was pleasantly surprised by how many people came up to me and told me they had moved (sometimes) hundreds of sites from other hosts to xCloud.

One of the things I was promoting was white label hosting for freelancers and agencies. It’s something I’ve been meaning to spin up for MediaForge, and something I’ll be making a video on in the next couple weeks. Basically you can become a web host with xCloud managing the hard stuff. It’s pretty slick. If you want to know more let me know.

WordCamp Networking

My favorite track at WordCamps is the Hallway Track. I really love meeting new people, greeting old friends, and learning about what everyone is building and doing. Since I was there with xCloud I was quite interested in both what other hosts were doing, but also what regular people were doing for hosting.

It looks like hosts are going all in on AI, with site builders, plan management etc. It sort of feels like the way we’ve always managed hosting (menus, settings, etc.) is passing, and soon we’ll simply tell an AI “Set up a new site with SSL, using Gutenberg and this theme and those plugins” and it’ll happen. As a certified Old Person it feels weird, but I guess everything does when it’s new.

Here are some pictures of some great people I met at WordCamp:

Additionally, I was in a short video made by WP Sprints, check this out:

Contributor Day

I was selected as a Table Lead for the Photos Table. Typically that means I help people get involved with the WordPress Photos project. This year they pivoted quite hard just a couple days before the event and decided that rather than have team tables they would have projects, with contributors from many tables.

Michelle Frechette had the brilliant idea of building a plugin to integrate the photos project into the WordPress media library. I had my doubts we could do it in a day, but AI has really accelerated plugin development, so we dove in. With a single prompt I had a VERY rudimentary plugin running before we even announced what we were building!

We had many contributors and testers, I won’t list them all, but I do want to call out Matt Galdino, who did some really great work on the UI. Kamran Abdul Aziz also did some great work remotely, speeding up the entire plugin quite a lot.

By the end of the day we had a very usable plugin on github. You can download it and test it now! I’ve added a bunch of new features since then, and it’ll go into the WordPress.org plugins repository soon.

Here’s a screenshot of it.

About the heat…

I saw it get to 113F. I walked several blocks in it, carrying a backpack. It wasn’t that bad. Only once did I sweat, and it wasn’t that much. The week before I left I went to check the mail here in Michigan and came back drenched in sweat. It was 69F, but 87% humidity. I was much more comfortable with the 113F than the 69F. If it were only 80 or 90F out there I think it would be very livable.

Summary

I had a really great time. It was profitable, it was fun, and I met some great people. Thanks Phoenix!