WordCamp US 2025 – Portland, OR
WordCamp US 2025’s Showcase Day lit up the conference’s opening with inspiring live demos, case studies, and how-to sessions. It wasn’t just a showcase: it brought WordPress to life.
From the opening keynote by Amy Sample Ward, The Tech That Comes Next, to immersive deep dives like Joeleen Kennedy’s session on modernizing Wikimedia’s UX with full-site editing, the day pulsed with purposeful innovation.
Josh Bryant showed how Gutenberg can live beyond WordPress itself, embedding it into a React-based editorial system for enterprise workflows. One attendee, Jai Ranganathan, a contractor for National Marine Sanctuaries, marveled, “Who would have thought of taking out the block editor and putting it in a React system? It’s incredible how people are mixing and matching WordPress like colors on a canvas.”
And in Ramon Corrales’s talk on WordPress in the newsroom, he demonstrated how the platform supports real journalism in an era where truth and trust matter more than ever. “Anybody, whether a big company or an individual, can have the same professional website if they want it,” said Mia Cantrell, Customer Support leader for Saturday Drive – Ninja Forms. “That’s the power of WordPress.”
Meanwhile, Weston Ruter’s performance-lab-powered approach to site speed reinforced WordPress’s capacity to push technical boundaries.
Creative Tools in Action
Conference-goers got hands-on in Jamie Marsland’s Launch Your Personal Portfolio workshop, while Jeffrey Paul tackled AI ethics and scalability in content workflows, showing that using AI with WordPress isn’t just possible, it’s powerful and responsible.
Community and Scale
Sessions like Dennis Ploetner’s talk on simplifying multisite ownership and Jakob Trost’s deep dive into CANCOM’s system scaling across 150 sites highlighted how WordPress thrives in both agency and enterprise ecosystems.
But Showcase Day was just as much about people as it was about technology, “It’s really about engaging with the community, building together, and showing customers how to solve hard problems,” said Travis Ralph, Solution Engineer at WordPress VIP.
Mike Jandreau, Senior Front-end Engineer at Imarc and a third-time WordCamp attendee, summed up the community: “The people that work with WordPress tend to be really open, collaborative and it’s one of those things that I really like about this community. People that work on open source projects in particular give me hope for the world.”
Innovation with Impact
Talks like Wendy Erdheim-Poch’s Catch Bugs Faster with AI & Playwright and Jen Miller and Mitch Canter’s How We Revamped the Jim Joseph Foundation Site Without Disruption offered lessons in testing, delivery, and change management.
Why Showcase Day Mattered
Showcase Day delivered a compelling blend of “show” and “tell,” pairing real-world demos with the rationale behind them. It reflected where WordPress stands today while framing where it can go tomorrow.
Attendees captured this day best in one word: “Amazing.” “Hopeful.” “Fun.” “Enlightening.” “Inspiring.”
If you want to see WordPress’s potential in person, guided by expertise and community passion, Showcase Day at WCUS 2025 wasn’t just inspiring, it was game-changing.