This post was significantly updated in 2026 to reflect new information. An archived version from 2009 is available for reference here.
In the late spring of 2009, more than 700 WordPress enthusiasts gathered at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco for what would become one of the landmark moments in the history of blogging as a craft. WordCamp San Francisco wasn’t just a conference — it was a demonstration of what an open-source community could look like when people genuinely cared about what they were building together.
The speaker lineup alone captured the spirit of that moment. Timothy Ferriss was there, then riding the wave of The 4-Hour Workweek. Matt Cutts from Google gave practical SEO guidance that shaped how bloggers thought about search for years. Matt Mullenweg delivered his “State of the Word” address to a room full of people who felt like they were part of something growing, something meaningful. Automattic had just crossed 50 employees. WordPress powered a fraction of the internet it does today.
I find myself thinking about that event not as nostalgia, but as a reference point. What was WordCamp then? What does it represent now? And what do those questions tell us about where the WordPress community actually stands in 2026?
What WordCamp Was Built On
The genius of the early WordCamp model was its informality. At the 2009 San Francisco event, day two moved to Automattic’s offices in a loosely structured Barcamp format — three rooms open for discussion, developers presenting plugins, conversations spilling into hallways. There was a WordPress Genius Bar staffed entirely by volunteers, fielding everything from beginner questions about permalinks to complex hosting migrations.
What made it work wasn’t the speakers or the production value. It was the sense that everyone in the room — attendees, presenters, Automattic employees — was working on something shared. The WordPress Genius Bar volunteers weren’t there for marketing. They were there because they genuinely wanted to help people. One attendee, after leaving the Genius Bar, described the experience as an “interrogation” — volunteers asking them more questions than they came in with, helping them think through what they were actually trying to build.
That quality of engagement is hard to manufacture. It comes from communities that form around genuine purpose rather than commercial interest. And for much of WordPress’s history, that’s exactly what existed.
How WordCamp Has Evolved — And What It Still Does Well
WordCamp has grown significantly since 2009. WordCamp US 2024, held in Portland, Oregon over four days in September, drew developers, designers, bloggers, and enterprise WordPress users from across the world. The event introduced a new “Showcase Day” — a dedicated session for demonstrating the range of what WordPress can actually do in production environments, from Disney’s rapid site deployment system to CNN Brazil’s infrastructure handling 70 million monthly visitors.
WordCamp events now run year-round across multiple continents, with regional flagships in Asia, Europe, and the US, alongside dozens of local and campus-level events. The global WordPress contributor community showed up for Contributor Day in Portland with over 400 people working across 20 teams, contributing code that shipped in the Twenty Twenty-Five theme for WordPress 6.7.
In many ways, the events have gotten better. More accessible, more organized, more internationally representative. And the core of what made the 2009 event special — the willingness of experienced practitioners to help others, the honest sharing of what works — still shows up when WordCamp is at its best.
The Part That’s Harder to Talk About
But looking at the WordPress community in 2026 without acknowledging what happened over the past two years would be dishonest.
In September 2024, Matt Mullenweg published a post calling WP Engine, one of the most successful companies in the WordPress ecosystem, a “cancer to WordPress.” What followed was one of the most damaging governance crises in the history of open-source software. Mullenweg blocked WP Engine from accessing WordPress.org resources. He took over WP Engine’s widely-used Advanced Custom Fields plugin without consent. He added a checkbox to the WordPress.org contributor login requiring developers to verify they weren’t associated with WP Engine. When community members objected, some found their accounts suspended.
WP Engine filed suit against Automattic and Mullenweg in October 2024, alleging extortion and abuse of power. A U.S. District Court granted a preliminary injunction in December 2024, ordering Automattic to restore access and remove the discriminatory measures. In January 2025, Automattic announced it would scale back its weekly contribution to the open-source WordPress project from roughly 4,000 hours to just 45 — redirecting its engineers toward for-profit Automattic products instead. The legal battle continues, with a jury trial currently scheduled for early 2027.
None of this fits neatly into a recap of an energizing community event. But it matters precisely because of what WordCamp 2009 represented. The values on display in those conference halls — openness, collaboration, helping people without commercial motivation — were always the foundation of why WordPress worked as a community project. When that foundation is questioned, it’s worth sitting with the discomfort rather than looking away.
What the 2009 Event Still Teaches Us
There’s a session title from WordCamp San Francisco 2009 that has stayed with me: “How to Blog Without Killing Yourself.” It sounds lighthearted, but the underlying question was serious. How do you build something sustainable? How do you keep caring about your work without burning it — or yourself — down?
That question applies to communities as much as it does to individuals.
The WordPress community in 2009 was energized by the sense that the platform’s success was something everyone shared in. Mullenweg’s “State of the Word” talk worked because the audience felt implicated in the story he was telling — not as customers, but as contributors and co-builders. The WordPress Genius Bar worked because it was staffed by people who genuinely loved helping. The Developer Day at Automattic’s offices worked because the doors were literally open.
What the ongoing governance crisis has surfaced is a structural question that was always present but easy to ignore when things were going well: how much of that communal spirit was real, and how much was contingent on one person’s mood and judgment? Joost de Valk, who built the most widely used SEO plugin in the WordPress ecosystem, put it plainly: the community needs to decide whether it’s comfortable being led by a single person who controls everything, or whether it wants something different.
That’s not a criticism unique to WordPress. It’s a question that every community built around an open-source project eventually has to answer.
Where This Leaves WordPress Users and Bloggers
For bloggers and content creators who’ve built their sites on WordPress — which still powers around 40% of the web — none of this is a reason to panic. The software itself remains excellent. The plugin ecosystem remains vast. The community of independent developers, designers, and WordPress specialists who show up at WordCamps and contribute to core isn’t going anywhere.
But the events of the last eighteen months are a reminder that platform dependency is worth thinking about clearly. Building your publishing infrastructure on WordPress is a reasonable choice. Assuming that the governance of the project will remain stable or that the community will always operate the way it did in 2009 is a different kind of assumption — one that the current moment gives us reason to examine.
The most interesting sessions at WordCamp 2024, by many accounts, weren’t the ones about plugins or performance. They were the ones about community, governance, and what it actually means to invest in open source for the long term. Those conversations are harder and less immediately useful than a tutorial on SEO or site speed. But they’re the ones that determine whether the next fifteen years of WordPress looks like the last fifteen — or like something we won’t recognize.
The Enduring Value of Gathering
What I remember most clearly about the accounts of WordCamp San Francisco 2009 isn’t the speaker list or the technical sessions. It’s the image of someone walking away from the WordPress Genius Bar feeling like they answered their own questions — because someone took the time to ask the right ones.
That’s what WordCamp, at its best, has always been about. Not the keynotes or the sponsor booths or the networking receptions. The actual, unhurried conversation between people who care about the same thing. That quality hasn’t disappeared from WordCamp events. It was present in Portland in 2024, and it will be present wherever the WordPress community gathers next.
The platform is going through a genuinely difficult period. But the people who make it worth using are still there. And if the 2009 event taught us anything, it’s that community built on real investment — in the work, in each other, in the project itself — is more durable than any single controversy. The question is whether the structures that house that community are worth protecting, and what protecting them might now require.
That conversation is overdue. The good news is that the community has been having it.
