We’re back from WordCamp US 2026 in Phoenix and Frappeverse Mumbai 2026.
WordCamp US in Phoenix was all about August heat, driverless Waymos shunting around and of course, the beautiful WordPress community! We participated in full force with 8 of us from our US & global teams, and 4 of us speaking, making it one of our biggest presences so far at a flagship WordCamp. Vivek Jain, Aviral Mittal and Jeremy Jones spoke about topics ranging from agencies in the age of AI, AI-led editorial workflows & governance, and championing WordPress inside enterprises.
David Levine led the AI hackathon on Contributor Day and hosted the fireside chat with Waymo’s Amanda Ventura on building the world’s most trusted driverless cars.
At Frappeverse Mumbai, again, 8 of us attended, while our Senior Software Engineer Niraj Gautam presented our work on Migrating 1.4 million tickets from Zendesk to Frappe Helpdesk.
Speaking of enterprise builds, we finally unveiled a couple of case studies about some of our long-running projects.
Penske Media runs Billboard, Variety, Rolling Stone, The Hollywood Reporter, and 20+ other brands on one shared frontend. We have worked alongside their team since 2019. Our latest case study traces the evolution from Larva to Nova, a React-to-PHP framework. It also covers 14 redesigns, Piano onboarding across nine brands, and migration of 1000+ email templates.
The second case study is about one of North America’s largest media networks that ran 32 newspaper sites on 32 codebases, so every fix had to be built 32 times. Here is how we consolidated them onto one WordPress VIP Multisite.
The latest core release, WordPress 7.1 “Mary Lou” is out, marking the 36th consecutive WordPress release with rtCamp contributors. 63 rtCampers contributed to the release.
GoDAM released versions 2.1 and 2.2, adding interactive image hotspots, Viewer Retention Curves, and Elementor and WPBakery support. Document handling now goes beyond PDFs to Word, Excel and PowerPoint, with in-browser preview and content search.
WordPress news snippets
- WordPress joined more than 270 organizations on the Open Weights and American AI Leadership letter. It urges policymakers to preserve downloadable, adaptable AI models.
- Eric Mann has proposed a Secrets API for WordPress 7.2. It would encrypt plugin credentials instead of storing them as plaintext options.
- The WooCommerce 11.0 release comes with improved product and Order screen performance, analytics accuracy, guest order history, and checkout recovery testing.
- WordPress has launched a public Credits dashboard showing program growth, including students, institutions, contributions, sites built, skills, and testimonials.
- WordPress Contributor Toolkit 1.0 simplifies first-time Core contributions, handling development setup, patches, pull requests, testing, and keeping trunk current.
Frappe & ERPNext updates
- Frappe ran its first agentic coding demo day with a showcase of over 22 products and features built by engineers and non-engineers using AI coding tools
- Frappe’s August product updates add Bob, an AI assistant in Builder. Mail gained an email screener, and CRM gained a web form builder.
From around the web
- Automattic has launched Spacefast, an agent-native hosting platform that lets AI agents build projects and publish them instantly with live URLs.
- Cursor rolled out Origin, its agent-focused code hosting platform with repositories, pull requests, code browsing, and GitHub synchronization.
- Google’s Preferred Sources includes an embeddable button that lets users select favorite publishers and see relevant stories in Top Stories.
- Salesforce has introduced Slack Code, giving teams shared code channels where people and AI agents can build, review, preview, and ship software.
- Z.ai released GLM-5.3, lifting Terminal-Bench 3.0 from 4.6 to 28.3 with post-training alone. Sibling GLM-5.3-Flash ships MIT-licensed weights at a tenth of the price.
Upcoming events
- WordCamp Asia 2027 has opened speaker applications for the event, to be held in Penang, Malaysia, during April 9-11, 2027.
- WordPress Accessibility Day 2026 is seeking volunteers for the online event on October 7 and 8, covering moderation, media review, captioning, translations, and support.
Blogs from rtCampers
- How I reverse engineer conductor app by @Utsav Patel
- Translating a WordPress plugin, including the JavaScript by @Aryan Jasala
- Celebrities vs. The Rest of Us: Designing a Twitter-Style Feed by @Deepak Kumar
- Designing and Building My Own Ergonomic Keyboard by @Lakshyajeet Singh Goyal
Watercooler
Popular on our #watercooler Slack channel.
- Radar Daily Briefings – A clearer signal for WordPress and engineering
- Pyxle – Python & React in One file
- Introducing the WordPress Browser Extension
- God’s Eye View – Spy satellite simulator
WordPress news snippets
Frappe & ERPNext updates
From around the web
Upcoming events
Blogs from rtCampers
Watercooler
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Credits
Aviral Mittal
Author
Aviral Mittal
Author
Aviral Mittal is the Chief Marketing Officer at rtCamp, where he established and leads the marketing function, building and growing a team of 20+ specialists across content, SEO, design, and growth…
Abhijit Prabhudan
Author
Abhijit Prabhudan
Author
Works on content systems, publishing workflows, and knowledge management. Diverse experience spans editorial, marketing, ecommerce, and IT support. He operates across open source platforms, hand…
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