WordCamp Sylhet 2026 recap: the no swag policy, a busy unofficial marketing table at Contributor Day, and why you should join a local WordCamp.
WordCamp Sylhet 2026 happened on 2 and 3 October. This was the 3rd time WordCamp Sylhet was held.
This year was a little different from the other years. This time, WordCamp Sylhet organisers made a “no swag policy”. Swag means gifts. It means sponsors and booths would not give out any gifts.
The main reason was simple. They wanted only the people who really want to join the sessions to come to WordCamp. Who are interested in WordPress and wanted to learn about the WordPress community. They also wanted people who want to meet others and learn from them to buy tickets. That’s why many people felt there was less hype about WordCamp Sylhet this time. It is normal to feel that. The tickets did not sell out in one or two minutes like before. Also, many tech companies in our country let people go from their jobs in recent years, so everyone felt worried about the industry. Maybe that is why many people who would have joined WordCamp Sylhet did not join this time.
But I liked the “no swag policy”. I saw the last WordCamp Dhaka. There were so many good sessions. But everyone was busy running after gifts at the booth area. The session rooms were empty. This time, that problem got a little smaller. There were enough people (nearly 400 attendees). Also, this time there were two hands-on workshops next to the sessions. In the workshops, people could learn by doing things practically. I felt happy to see many people join them with great interest.
Here is a funny thing. On Contributor Day of WordCamp Sylhet, I became the leader of a table, but not officially. Like the other tables, we wanted to have a marketing table too. But at first nobody was interested, so the table was not announced officially. Later, they told my colleague and me, but not officially. I thought, since it was not official, I would just come, stay and chat with people. In the morning, I did not feel well, so I came a little late. And when I came, wow! 15 to 20 people were already at the marketing table. My colleague sat me down right in the middle of them.
Marketing table, Contributor DayTalking with my marketing friendsA very fun chat!
The next two or three hours were wonderful. Everyone had questions about marketing and AI today. I answered as many as I could from my own experience. It was a really good talk with the marketers from our country. I liked Contributor Day a lot.
150 contributors attended today's Contributor Day at WordCamp Sylhet 2026!
Thank you to all the attendees, volunteers, active contributors, and table leads who help make WordPress better every day. 💙 pic.twitter.com/BACW2w0HKt
I did not feel well on Conference Day either, so I could not go early. Like every year, Conference Day was at SUST. In the morning, my teammate called me. He said a circuit inside the venue had burned out. There was no electricity, so the ACs were not working. Although the organisers arranged a generator, it was not enough. Everyone was suffering in the heat. When I heard this, I went to SUST a little later, and it was as bad as he said. It was very bad luck for the organizers. They could do nothing about it, but they tried all day to fix it. I know most of them, so I saw their hard work up close. Without this problem, WordCamp Sylhet 2026 would have been even better.
The last day was a joy for everyone who attended. Here's a glimpse to help you relive the memories: WordCamp Sylhet 2026. pic.twitter.com/HGzr8Dpqm4
I met and talked with many friends on Conference Day too. An event like this happens only once a year. It is the one time I get to meet and chat with the friends of our tech community. I like that.
With my two favorite colleagues at Contributor Day
Conference Day was a little more special this time because two of my colleagues, Russel and Dhrupo, each had their own session. I liked both of them very much.
WordCamp Sylhet 2023 was my first WordCamp. After that, I joined WordCamp Sylhet 2024, WordCamp Dhaka 2025, WordCamp Malaysia 2026, and now WordCamp Kathmandu 2026. For those of us in the WordCamp world, it is a very special event. In these two days, each of us tries to give our hard work, our time and our skills to the WordPress community. WordCamps are our way to give back to open source.
Sylhet WordCamp 2026, Nishat Shahriyar, WordPress
Not everyone knows this. People from the community plan WordCamp themselves, in their own free time, with their own hard work. The organizers get no money from it. The volunteers get no money either. Everyone works without pay, because WordCamp is a community event. The other day I heard someone complain about the organizers. He thought an event company had planned it. I told him he was wrong. I explained that the organizers and volunteers are people from the WordPress community, and they give their free time and hard work to plan these WordCamps.
If you work in WordPress or tech, join a local WordCamp. If you can, join the ones in other countries too. You will understand how these events feel only after you join them. I cannot explain it to you in words. If you want to come into this WordPress community, join the local WordCamps too and see how it feels. You can also learn a lot from the industry leaders.
If you are a student, WordPress has a program called Campus Connect. Use it to join the WordPress community. You have so much time at your age. Now is the time to get ready for industry while you study.
WordCamp Kathmandu 2026 ran on September 18 and 19 at Alice Receptions in Gairidhara. Contributor Day came first, then the conference day. I went to both. I left with few replies on Trac ticket, a plan to apply to the WordPress education program, and a list of people I want to keep talking to.
this is my experience (photo blog loading…1,2,3!)
Mandatory click!
Getting there
I reached Dhaka on September 16 from Sylhet and flew to Kathmandu on the 17th. My family came with me. I have always loved Nepal, and I had visited once before, in 2024, with my colleagues and loved every bit of it. This time we stayed in Thamel.
Alice Receptions
On the morning of the 18th, my family was still asleep. I had breakfast at the hotel and called an Uber bike. The driver misunderstood the route and took me to the wrong place. I fixed it on the map and reached Alice Receptions at 8:30 am. Thank god the road was free of traffic.
So good to join!
Contributor Day at the Core table
This was my first official Contributor Day. I had worked on Trac tickets before, but only on my own. This time I sat at the Core table and tried to do it the proper way.
WordCamp Kathmandu 2026
Bikash Pun Magar, from the website team, was the volunteer helping at our table, and he walked me through the process.
Core table – WordCamp Kathmandu 2026
I spent the first part of the day researching how I could help on the tickets. What I had to offer was a marketer’s view. I shared my thoughts on four or five tickets, looking at what would improve the result for the person using WordPress.
One example is ticket 65975. The proposed helper text for the Site Icon said “square aspect ratio (1:1).” That is accurate, but I thought it could trip up people who are not thinking in aspect ratios when they upload an icon. In comment 5 I suggested a plainer version: use a square image (equal width and height) at least 512 × 512 pixels.
People understand equal width and height without knowing what an aspect ratio is. “Use a square image” tells them what to do. And a simpler source string is easier for translators, which matters because this text is shared across two files and gets translated into dozens of languages. I also backed a follow-up Gutenberg issue, since the Site Editor words the same field differently.
The person who wrote the original wording replied. They agreed their first suggestion might be too technical for most WordPress users.
I liked seeing that. It felt good that my opinion mattered and that I could share what I know in a way that helped. I still get nervous when I contribute. But working on tickets alongside other contributors, I felt confident. I plan to join more Contributor Days and learn from the people around me.
The table itself felt different from working alone. People called out to each other. Laptops were open on the same ticket. Someone walked another contributor through a patch on their screen. By my rough count, there were more than a hundred contributors in the room. Between tickets, I asked people what they do and where they work, and those short talks made the hours go quickly.
I sat with the developers of Codewing Solutions, a company run by Nabin Jaiswal. They showed me an integration they built with one of the tools I work with, and told me about a second one in progress. I talked with Nabin about it. He said that when it is done, we will do a collaboration to promote it. He also messaged me on LinkedIn offering help with anything I need. Nepali people are kind, and that is a big reason I like going back.
I love you guys!
Later in the day, I moved to the Education table. I had followed Pooja Derashri‘s work from the start, through Make WordPress updates and her social media. It is my firt time meeting her.
First meeting Pooja Derashri
I was interested in the education program, so we talked about how I can start contributing.
Education Table – WordCamp Kathmandu 2026
Events are popping up in Bangladesh and people are already working on them. She told me to apply through the WordPress education page, and said a lead will contact me. I plan to apply. I also told her we are interested in running a session at a school in Sylhet and seeing how that could work.
Contributor Day group photo – WordCamp Kathmandu 2026
The sessions that stuck
On the conference day, I sat in on three sessions: Pooja’s, MD Saif Hassan’s and Shriram Lamichhane’s.
Pooja’s session on WordPress education programs gave me the full picture. I had not known how the education program and the Campus Connect and credits program run in practice. I also did not know the credit program certificate comes from the WordPress Foundation. If I remember it right, it carries Matt Mullenweg’s signature, which makes it more credible. The Q&A was useful. People asked how to sell the program to universities and how to show why the credit program matters. Pooja’s answer on selling it was that a university can add another credit program to what it offers without investing in building the workshop or the support materials.
This was so good!
I first met Saif bhai at WordCamp Sylhet in 2023. His talk, “AI as a Bicycle for the Mind,” had a full room, and people liked it. I did too. He came at AI from an angle I had not heard before. He went through history and said that at every big change, people claimed something was dead, and life found its way. His Jurassic Park framing of that stayed with me. His take on creativity was that creative people will thrive in the AI era. He also said we should use AI for augmentation, not automation. Augmentation means AI helps one person do more. Automation means replacing that person. We need to focus on this in our organisations and companies.
Shriram Lamichhane’s talk took me back to my early days. I also started by building websites in a cyber cafe, in 2005 and 2006. I built sites on Yahoo GeoCities and hobby blogs on Blogger, wrote posts, and tried to rank them. In the session, he said his platform gets more than a million visitors a month. What he built at his age impressed me a lot. I wish I could show his talk to many young people in my country.
There were other amazing sessions too during the conference day. I wish I could join all of these too, but much of my time goes into talking and networking with people.
Between the sessions
I met a few Bangladeshi friends there. Foysol Imran was with his family. Nazmul Hasan Robin was there with his family too, and he led the Accessibility table on Contributor Day. I saw Saif bhai again. There was an Automattic booth; another Foysol bhai greeted me at the Automattic booth. It was great to talk with Pooja about the education program in person.
Meeting new people!Met these 2 energetic nepali students
I also met two Nepali students who came to the WordCamp through the Campus Connect program. For about an hour, they kept asking me questions on many topics. Both are worried about where they will stand in the future job market because of AI. I tried to give them a little motivation. One is already getting hands-on with building plugins using AI. The other is a bit more confused because they are younger. I liked seeing their interest. There were a lot of young kids at this WordCamp. The Bangladesh WordPress community needs to look at this and find ways to bring young teenagers in Bangladesh into WordPress.
I spent time with Sunita Rai from SiteSaga.com, one of the media partners. I met her at WordCamp Sylhet in 2023, so this was our second meeting. She told me about their project and how they are investing more in video. I told her to do even more of it, because Google’s AI Overviews are cutting organic traffic by 70% now. Investing in personality is the answer. People follow people.
I also met Umesh Ghimire, an old Nepali friend from my 2024 trip with my colleagues.
I met the lead organiser, Regan Khadgi, for the first time. He and his team were fabulous. Mina Tamang from the communication team did a great job, and I told her the event felt like a flagship event. Eurika KC from the content creation team hosted Contributor Day very well. Pratik Lal Shrestha was another great person to meet. I met many more people I cannot name here, and I am glad I met them in Kathmandu.
With Lead organiser, Regan Khadgi
The lunch on both days was great. I can still taste it. All the food was halal, and Regan checked that with me himself. Small things like that made the event better. They thought about everyone. I might join the next WordCamp Nepal or Kathmandu just for the food! Hahaha!
I stayed until the closing ceremony. The mood in the room was on another level. I skipped the after-party because my family was waiting for me at the hotel. I bet the food was great there too!
Last group photo – WordCamp Kathmandu 2026
What I’m taking back
Apply to the WordPress education program through Make WordPress, as Pooja suggested, and wait for the lead to reach out.
Explore a session at a school in Sylhet, which I raised with Pooja. I already talked about this with some of my teammates.
Join more Contributor Days, and keep sharing a marketer’s view on Trac tickets.
If you are in the WordPress world in Bangladesh or anywhere, join your local WordCamp and talk to people there. It helps the open source community, and it helps you grow. Then try to get to an international WordCamp. It changed how I think. It will changed you too. You see the bigger picture, you get curious about more things, and that helps your skills and your career.
WordCamp Malaysia was my first international WordCamp, that experience was i thought the best. WordCamp Kathmandu is my 2nd international WordCamp, and it became the most amazing WordCamp i experienced so far! I am sure going to the next WordCamp in Nepal!
WordCamp US 2026 had 60+ sessions. Most of them I won’t remember in a week.
These six stayed with me.
They covered migration, creator economy, agency positioning, plugin audits, Substack exits, and the agentic web. But what connected all of them was the same underlying question: what does it actually take to build something that lasts on WordPress in 2026?
If you missed the conference, or sat in different rooms, here are the ones I think are worth 30 minutes of your time. I’ve linked each video below and added my take on why it stuck with me.
1. When the platform belongs to its users: migrating Daily Kos at scale
When the Platform Belongs to Its Users: Migrating Daily Kos at Scale | Ben Greeley Allison McHenry
Daily Kos is a 23-year-old progressive political platform with 1.5 million posts, 2.7 million users, and 88 million comments. In early 2026, they moved the whole thing off a crumbling custom Ruby/Pearl CMS onto WordPress. XWP’s Ben Greeley and Daily Kos CTO Allison McHenry walked through how they pulled it off.
The technical side is genuinely interesting. Parallelizing the migration with Action Scheduler cut weeks of processing down to days. They moved 1.4 million images by having WordPress VIP upload them in bulk rather than migrating one by one. They ran daily delta migrations in the final stretch so there would be no massive last-minute content dump at launch.
But the technical work was the easy part. The harder problem was that 85% of Daily Kos’s revenue comes directly from its readers. These are people who log in daily, write their own posts, and fund the platform. Losing their trust would have ended the business.
“The community that uses the site also supports the site. They pay my salary. We have to care about the community’s experience.”
– Allison McHenry, CTO at Daily Kos
The thing that stood out to me was the community advisory panel. Before the migration started, the team brought in fewer than 10 high-profile community members and gave them a real seat at the table, not a feedback form or a newsletter update. These people sat in vendor meetings, read the RFP responses, and helped explain decisions to the wider community in a way that didn’t sound like it was coming from staff.
My take: Most agencies treat migration as a technical handoff. Daily Kos treated it as a community management problem that happened to have a technical component. That order of priority is what made the difference. If you are planning a big WordPress migration, the groundwork you do with your users before a single line of code moves matters more than the migration script itself.
2. How The Ankler outgrew Substack and built an independent platform on WordPress
How The Ankler Outgrew Substack and Built An Independent Platform on WordPress | Nicola Catton
The Ankler covers Hollywood. 15 newsletters, around $10 million in annual revenue, 150,000 subscribers. In April 2026 they moved off Substack onto WordPress. XWP’s Nikki Catlin delivered this one, and it is the clearest counter-argument to the “publishers are fleeing WordPress” narrative you will hear anywhere.
The Ankler didn’t leave Substack because Substack failed them. They left because they outgrew it. One paid tier works when you’re a solo creator. It does not work when you have a dozen columnists who are brands in their own right, direct ad deals with studios, and plans for events and video. The move came down to three things: ownership of subscriber data, control of ad inventory, and pricing flexibility.
The Substack export situation is a mess worth knowing about if you ever plan to migrate a publication off the platform. You get words and almost nothing else. No images (24,000 of them were missing), no author data, no SEO titles, no canonicals, no comments. Two of their three export attempts hung for 28 hours each. They ended up building a custom JSON API to scrape the relational metadata that the export didn’t include.
“An inbox is almost a one-way rented channel. Everything that publishing and media industries are chasing right now, retention, loyalty, trust, engagement, two-way interaction, you need a destination that you own. A newsletter is an incredible front door.”
– Nikki Catlin, Chief Delivery Officer at XWP (on The Ankler)
One detail that impressed me: the previous Substack editor let editors hand-place the paywall inside each post at the exact moment most likely to convert a reader. 2,000 posts had these custom paywall positions. Rather than wiping them and defaulting to “cut after paragraph two,” the team wrapped the content below each marker into a password-restricted block and preserved every one of those editorial decisions.
My take: I run nishishere.com and I moved content off Substack myself. The missing images and the metadata gap frustrated me exactly the way Nikki described. What I didn’t appreciate until watching this session was how much editorial value can be quietly destroyed in a migration if you aren’t looking for it. Also: WordPress is not the platform people are leaving. It is the platform growing businesses move to when they need to own something.
3. The WordPress agency is becoming invisible: why that is a good thing
The WordPress Agency Is Becoming Invisible: Why That Is a Good Thing | Vivek Jain
Vivek Jain is the Chief Business Officer at Rtcamp. He has spent 15 years as the first point of contact for enterprise clients, and over the last few years he has watched four things change simultaneously.
RFPs used to start with platform requirements. Now they start with business outcomes. The people in the room used to be IT heads. Now they are CMOs, Directors of Content Operations, and CROs. The agencies Rtcamp competes against are no longer other WordPress shops. They are digital experience firms and marketing agencies that don’t mention WordPress at all. Clients no longer open with “we want to move to WordPress” either. They open with “we want to modernize our marketing operations.”
Vivek’s car-buying story landed well. He walked into Volkswagen and got a full brief on engine torque and top speed. He walked into Suzuki and got asked where he drives, how big his family is, and what he wants the experience to feel like. He bought the Suzuki. His point: customers move toward whoever mirrors their problem back to them, not whoever has the most impressive technical answer.
“We don’t lead with WordPress. We mention WordPress at the end of the document. We lead with the solution we can give to them. We always want to come across as WordPress experts, but as an outcome-solving company who can do things for you with WordPress.”
– Vivek Jain, Chief Business Officer at Rtcamp
His practical shift at Rtcamp: they now mention WordPress at the end of proposals, not the beginning. They lead with what problem they can solve, and then show how WordPress is the answer to that specific question. They also don’t stop at site delivery. They track whether clients hit the conversion or editorial velocity goals they articulated at the start of the engagement.
My take: I’m not an agency owner but this session taught me something about how the whole ecosystem is maturing. When enterprises stop asking for “WordPress work” and start asking for outcomes, it means the platform has become trusted infrastructure, not a differentiator. That’s actually a good position for WordPress to be in. For agencies: if your clients describe you as their WordPress partner, you’re still being seen through the wrong lens.
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A Practical Playbook for Auditing and Simplifying Complex WordPress Sites | Matt Dorman
Matt Dorman has inherited a lot of messy WordPress sites. This session was built around two real audits he ran before the conference, two sites with a combined 100 plugins.
How does a site end up with 100 plugins? One at a time, always for a reason. A campaign needs a popup. A new developer prefers a different form builder and adds it without removing the old one. An SEO tool gets swapped and nobody deletes the previous one. People leave, institutional knowledge walks out with them, and nobody touches the plugins because they are afraid of breaking something.
The audit across those two sites found three in ten plugins doing nothing useful at all. Twenty deactivated plugins still deployed. A plugin discontinued by its vendor in 2019. A helper plugin for a calendar plugin that no longer existed. An empty plugin directory. And one active plugin with a readme that described it as a “temporary fix.” Last updated 11 years ago, last tested on WordPress 4.2.
“None of this is solved by trying harder. It really needs a method.”
– Matt Dorman
His sequencing advice is the practical part: start with the easy wins (inactive and clearly unused plugins), move to security vulnerabilities, then work on consolidation where you need someone else’s sign-off, and save custom plugin rewrites for last. The performance gains from cleaning up options bloat alone moved some pages from hundreds-of-milliseconds improvements to full seconds.
He also shipped a GitHub plugin specifically designed to scan plugin files for what they actually do rather than what their readme claims, which is the only honest way to evaluate custom plugins.
My take: I manage marketing for three WordPress products, so I spend a lot of time on WordPress sites. Plugin bloat is real and it slows everything down in ways that compound slowly until they’re suddenly obvious. The part that resonated most is that nobody cleans this up because nobody wants to be responsible for breaking production. Matt’s method gives you the confidence to act because you understand what you’re removing before you remove it.
5. The future of creator commerce: building a business beyond ads
The Future of Creator Commerce: Building a Business Beyond Ads | Chandice Probst
Chandice Probst runs Tastemaker Conference, which brings together 500 of the biggest food creators in the world. She’s also been a creator herself for 18 years, since a celiac disease diagnosis sent her into gluten-free cooking and never looked back.
She opened with three questions: if Google disappeared, would your business survive? If Instagram disappeared? If AI answered your audience’s questions before they clicked? The last one was the point. Generic information is now abundant and free. What AI cannot replace is 18 years of specific trust with a specific audience about a specific thing.
Her framework puts audience first, then community, then trust, then products. Skip trust and jump to selling and conversion drops. She had a live example from that week: Alex Cooper, host of Call Her Daddy with millions of followers, launched a wellness drink called Unwell. It failed. Reach without a relevant product for that audience is not a business. Chandice’s own test was the same. She tried sharing fashion content to her gluten-free food audience. Nothing converted. When she shares gluten-free bread recommendations, people buy immediately.
“Your content is the vehicle for everything you’re going to build, but trust is the asset. I want you to remember that.”
– Chandice Probst
The commercial model she described is a natural extension of this: brands are shifting budgets away from celebrities and toward micro-influencers with genuine conversion. They’re paying for the relationship, not the follower count. And for creators building their own products, she is blunt: never too soon to prime your audience to buy. Give value three times, then make the ask. And what you sell has to solve the problem your audience actually has, not a random opportunity you spotted.
My take: This is the session I connected with most personally because I care about the creator economy. Chandice was the most engaging speaker at the whole conference. Her point about trust as the real asset cuts across everything. For WP founders especially: your users do not buy your plugin because it exists. They buy it because they trust that you understand their problem. That trust is built long before the sale, the same way Chandice builds it before she ever asks her audience to buy anything.
The Agentic Web Is Coming – Is WordPress Ready? | Miriam Schwab
Miriam Schwab delivered the most technically substantive session of the conference. She is also the most honest person I’ve seen talk about this topic, because she spent real time testing her own assumptions and reporting back when they didn’t hold up.
The framing: 50% of web traffic is already non-human. 68% of US Google searches end without a click. AI agents don’t browse the web the way humans do. They read it, query it, and will eventually act on it. WordPress runs 40.7% of the web, so what happens to agents and what happens to WordPress are connected.
She walked through what “agent ready” actually means technically: stable URLs, structured data, semantic HTML, markdown versions of pages for cleaner agent consumption, and eventually MCP endpoints that let agents take actions directly on your site. Since WordPress 7, the infrastructure is there: the WP AI Client, the MCP Adapter plugin (free), and the Abilities API that defines what an agent can do on a site.
She built a Claude Code routine that reads the website specification checklist from specification.website (maintained by Joost de Valk of Yoast), connects to her WordPress site through the MCP adapter, and generates a report on what to fix. She got her “Is It Agent Ready” score from 51 to 86.
“Being agent ready doesn’t mean it’s open season. It means you can be the one setting the terms. In this AI world, it’s either that or being invisible.”
– Miriam Schwab
Then she tested whether any of it mattered and found that Claude just used web fetch to read her pages directly, completely ignoring her markdown files, her LLMs.txt, and every agent-ready signal she’d added. The agents don’t need your fancy setup. They figured out their own way to read the web.
Her conclusion: the agent readiness score is mostly a vanity metric right now. The one thing actually required in the 21-point checklist is stable URLs, which you should have anyway. Keep building for humans first. The more accessible a site is to people, the more readable it is to machines.
My take: This is the session most WordPress founders are still sleeping on. The shift to agentic web access is real and moving fast, and the gap between people who understand the infrastructure and people who don’t is going to matter. Miriam’s core message: understand what’s being built and start paying attention now. If you’re not sure where your site stands, run the technical audit she described. And if you don’t have time to figure it out yourself, get help from someone who does before this shift accelerates.
A few threads that ran through all six
Migration always has a human layer that’s harder than the technical one. Daily Kos and The Ankler both figured this out. The sites that struggle in migration are the ones that treat users, subscribers, or communities as a data problem rather than a trust problem.
Owning your platform is not a nice-to-have. It’s the foundation everything else is built on. The Ankler couldn’t control their ad sizes on Substack. Daily Kos couldn’t add a login button. Miriam can’t configure how agents interact with her site unless she owns the infrastructure. WordPress keeps coming up as the answer to this question for a reason.
Chandice said it most directly but it ran through every session: trust is the actual asset. Agencies that lead with WordPress lose to agencies that lead with outcomes. Creators with millions of followers can’t sell a product their audience doesn’t trust them on. Platforms with active, invested communities survive migrations that would kill a site built on anonymous traffic.
If you watched different sessions at WordCamp US 2026, I’d genuinely like to know which ones stuck with you. Drop it in the comments.
