Twelve years ago, John O'Nolan departed from the WordPress community to launch Ghost as a scrappy Kickstarter project with an idealistic goal: give independent publishers the same technological superpowers as media giants, without locking them into closed, corporate platforms.

Ten years ago, he took stage at the very first LoopConf to share harsh, economic realities of building a product that is fundamentally free forever.

This year, John continues that conversation and reflects on twelve years of building and running Ghost, now a thriving non-profit with $8M/year in recurring revenue, a global team of 34, and over $100M earned by creators using the platform.

What does this mean for you, WordPress, and the open web? To answer that, you'll need to be here!

The past year has exposed just how fragile the WordPress ecosystem really is—from governance gaps to over-dependence on centralized infrastructure.

For years, contributors have called for more transparency, better infrastructure funding, and a structure that can truly protect the project’s future. Now, the FAIR Project is turning those ideas into action.

In this talk we’ll explore the technical and organizational implementation of FAIR, its distributed infrastructure, and how the project itself is managed and governed.

You’ll leave with a clear understanding of how FAIR is working to secure the next 20 years of WordPress—and how you can be part of it.

Ross has accumulated a wealth of knowledge over his 25+ years in the industry – spanning code, design, productivity and projects! But perhaps most profoundly, he’s learned about people.

Driven by a passion to share, Ross has embraced the challenge of distilling 25 lessons from his extensive career into a dynamic 25-minute session. Expect energy, inspiration, and actionable insights

Grab your notebooks, start your timers – you won’t want to miss this one!

Attackers can weaponize a vulnerability in a matter of hours, yet the ecosystem often takes weeks or months to fully patch, creating a massive window of exposure.

With thousands of plugins and themes within WordPress ecosystem, each a potential entry point, human-scale security is no longer a viable defense against machine-scale threats; hence, it's time for a new paradigm.

In this talk, let's design a multi agentic pipeline that can automate the entire security lifecycle, moving from detection to remediation in minutes, not months.

The three key takeaways for attendees from this talk include:

1. Discover practical techniques for fine-tuning code-analysis LLMs (eg, gpt-oss) to identify vulnerability patterns (e.g., improper nonce handling, unsanitized queries, XSS) within WordPress ecosystem.

2. Learn how to design a reliable multi-agent system for a production environment, complete with robust error handling, agent coordination, and fail-safe mechanisms tailored for WordPress.

3. Implement strategies for managing edge cases where automated patching fails, ensuring the system remains both effective and safe.

Learn how you can utilize various cloud services to vastly improve any WordPress sites or plugins you build.

First, Ivelina will show you how to use serverless libraries to offload intensive tasks. Next, she'll teach you how to leverage powerful machine learning (ML) and AI libraries, without requiring you to become either an ML or AI expert yourself.

From here, the possibilities are nearly endless—media manipulation, image optimization, interactive support agents, sentiment analysis, content summaries, multilingual support with real-time translation—and these are only a few examples!

You'll be amazed by the variety of things you can accomplish once you've unlocked even the basics of serverless potential.

Join Ana on a decades-long digital journey and learn why publishing to your own domain is still one of the most radical, powerful things you can do.

From humble beginnings as a teenage blogger, to becoming a world-renown speaker and educator, Ana will make the case for building your own little corner of the internet. Stop feeding the endlessly-hungry social media behemoths and begin nurturing your own place on the web.

No matter where you are in your own journey, you’ll leave with practical ways to (re)start your own personal site—no algorithms, gatekeeping, or performance pressure required.

Have you ever considered what would happen when a popular open source package is abandoned?

Now, what about when that package is one of your essential dependencies?

This scenario is not some abstract scenario for a far away future. Projects get abandoned every day and your dependency might be next... But you can help!

Come & listen to some tales of an accidental maintainer and learn about what you can do to help try and prevent these situations from getting out of hand.

More often than not, front-end developers focus purely on improving their technical skills.

This session will demonstrate a better approach, showing how developers can produce simpler, more resilient codebases by enhancing their planning and core skills—particularly by improving how they provide and receive feedback from their designer colleagues.

After the sessions conclude, and you've gotten some dinner, join us at The Oyster Shed for some highly coveted networking time.

We'll provide some canapés and a beverage or two. You provide the enticing conversation.

This is for ticketed attendees only—don't forget your badge!