WordCamp US 2026 recap: Matt’s Piplets demo, WordPress form plugin market share data, and the WP Rocket backlash explained.
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Hello WordPressers!
Welcome to this week’s WP More roundup. This is WP More newsletter issue 54, where you get curated news about WordPress and the WordPress community all in one place.
WordCamp US just wrapped in Phoenix. Matt Mullenweg teased a database-free WordPress experiment on stage. A new form plugin market share report landed with a surprise entry. A community builder left camp feeling uninspired and wrote about why. And the WordPress X account reignited old frustrations with its handling of the WP Rocket incident.
If you were also a WordCamp US attendee, what are your thoughts on Matt’s keynote?
In this Issue:
- Matt Mullenweg’s WCUS keynote: Piplets, AI, and a push for simplicity
- WordPress form plugin market share 2026: who’s up, who’s down
- What one community veteran took home from WordCamp US
- WordPress X account backlash over the WP Rocket/7.1 callout
- WordPress must read
- On other WordPress news
- From WordPress community
Matt Mullenweg’s WCUS Keynote: WordPress Needs to Be Simpler
The closing keynote at WordCamp US 2026 was an hour-long conversation between Matt Mullenweg and Robert Jacobi, covering AI, open source, and where WordPress is headed. The throughline: technology needs to get simpler, and WordPress is no exception.
The standout moment was Mullenweg introducing “Piplets,” a concept he hacked on in 2007, now rebuilt. A Piplet is a self-contained PHP file that stores its own data, no database required. He demoed a version loading in about 50 milliseconds and holding up to 25 megabytes. He wants to make them forkable and shareable on WordPress.org.
Mullenweg also suggested the community should put WordPress.org profiles on conference badges instead of social handles. On AI, he said the term might be backfiring and “automation” could land better. A notable share of the 1,000-plus attendees were at their first WordCamp.
Watch the full keynote on YouTube →
Speaking of what’s changing in the WordPress world, the form plugin market just got a fresh look at who’s actually running what.
WordPress Form Plugin Market Share 2026: CF7 Still Leads, but Gravity Forms Is Gaining
GravityKit published its 2026 WordPress form plugin market share study using the July 2026 HTTP Archive crawl. Contact Form 7 still leads at 29.74% of WordPress sites, but has bled nearly a quarter of its share since 2022. Every plugin with a full year of history lost ground except one.
Gravity Forms is the only plugin that gained share year-over-year, ticking up to 3.53%. WPForms sits at 2.43%, Formidable Forms at 0.88%, and Ninja Forms at 0.45%. The big new entrant is Fluent Forms, appearing in HTTP Archive’s detection library for the first time and landing at 1.09%, fourth in the ranking.
HTTP Archive only crawls the homepage and one interior page per site, so plugins that only load assets on a contact page are under-counted. These numbers are floors, not census figures. The direction of travel, though, is clear.
Disclaimer: I am the product marketing lead of Fluent Forms.
Read the full blog on GravityKit →
From plugin market share to something more personal, here’s what one veteran community member took away from this year’s WordCamp.
What One WordCamp US Veteran Took Home: Community Is Great, the Event Needs Work
James Laws, co-founder of Saturday Drive and creator of Ninja Forms, attended WordCamp US 2026 and wrote a candid post about it. The people were great. The event itself was not.
He described a vendor hall with about a dozen sponsors, mostly hosts, spread across a room too big for the crowd. Sponsorship costs have priced out smaller shops. The closing keynote started 25 minutes late and felt off-book. Laws’s core critique is a values shift: it used to feel like community was the goal and WordPress the tool. Now it feels inverted.
His suggestions: lower sponsor costs to bring in 40 or 50 smaller companies, give WordCamp US a permanent home, and revive regional camps. (I agree with him on these points; what are your thoughts?) He praised the volunteers and pointed the blame at the constraints they were handed, then committed to figuring out his own role in turning things around.
Read the full blog on JamesLaws.com →
Before the next story, a word from this week’s sponsor.
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Airo sits alongside the native WordPress editor rather than replacing it and you still get full wp-admin access.
The WordPress X Account Called Out WP Rocket. The Community Pushed Back Hard.
After WP Rocket’s compatibility issue caused fatal errors on WordPress 7.1 sites, Matt Mullenweg posted “Did your rocket explode? Get a Jetpack.” The official WordPress X account followed with a thread faulting WP Rocket for not fixing a bug it was warned about 44 days before the release, pushing users toward plugins in the official directory, and flagging unauthorized WordPress branding, all in one thread.
Developers questioned why the official WordPress account would amplify a story about 7.1 causing outages, and whether publicly targeting a major plugin helps anyone. The technical picture was also murkier: a Trac ticket flagged a backward-compatibility break in 7.1 itself. Anchor Hosting’s Austin Ginder noted the fatal only triggered with WP Rocket, Elementor Pro, and 7.1 combined. WP Rocket’s post-mortem said roughly 10% of its sites were hit.
Read the full blog on The Repository →
WordPress Must Read
→ Rank Math WordPress Plugin Accused Of Secretly Taking Admin Access (searchenginejournal.com)
→ WordPress Signs Open Weights AI Letter Alongside Automattic and GoDaddy (therepository.email)
→ How We Made Our Plugin 30x Times Faster (linkedin.com)
→ The WordPress 7.1 Outage: What Went Wrong, and What Changes Now (wp-rocket.me)
→ Anchor Hosting’s Austin Ginder Calls Out Hosts for Failing to Test WordPress Releases (therepository.email)
→ WordCamp US 2026: The Artist and the Algorithm (wordpress.com)
→ WordPress 7.1 Release Lead Decision Log (nomad.blog)
→ Hands-on with the WordPress 7.1 Icon Registration API (developer.wordpress.org) → Real Artists Ship: Contributor Day at WCUS 2026 (us.wordcamp.org)
→ Showcase Day at WordCamp US 2026 (us.wordcamp.org)
→ WordCamp US Day 3: From Taking It In to Putting It to Work (us.wordcamp.org) → Driving Into the Sunset: The Final Day of WCUS 2026 (us.wordcamp.org)
On Other WordPress News
→ AI Contributor Weekly Summary – 26 August 2026 (make.wordpress.org)
→ Performance Chat Summary: 25 August 2026 (make.wordpress.org)
→ Introducing Order Withdrawal in WooCommerce 11.1 (developer.woocommerce.com)
→ Help Shape the Accessibility Lab Plugin (make.wordpress.org)
→ Run Any Era of WordPress in Playground (make.wordpress.org)
→ Proposal: A Secrets API for WordPress 7.2 (make.wordpress.org)
→ WordPress 7.1 Highlights Video (youtube.com)
From WordPress Community
→ What’s New With Woo? (July 2026 Member Meetup) (thewpminute.com)
→ WPOCC: Rebranding, and Surveying the WordPress Community – WP Builds Podcast #482 (wpbuilds.com)
→ Wordfence’s New AI Agent Chains Six Flaws Into a Critical Unauthenticated RCE in Popular Avada Theme (therepository.email)
→ Adrian Sticea on Navigating the Decline of WordPress Work on Upwork and the Rise of New Opportunities (wptavern.com)
→ WordCamp US 2026 Experience (topher.how)
Until Next Week
Is your site still running a plugin that’s trending in the wrong direction? And after everything that happened this week with the WP Rocket callout, do you think the official WordPress account is helping or hurting the community’s trust?
Hit reply with your take. If this issue was useful, pass it along to someone in the WordPress community.
— Nishat, WP More
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