The Tourist Mentality
For 15 years, I was a WordPress guy. PHP, hooks, filters, the whole ecosystem. I knew it well enough to be dangerous and comfortable enough to never question whether I should look elsewhere. WordPress powers roughly 42% of the web, which sounds massive until you flip it around. That means 58% of the web runs on something else entirely. And for most of my career, I had almost no idea what was happening on that other side.
What changed? A DevRel role at Kinsta. Suddenly my job wasn’t just building with WordPress. It was understanding how developers across the entire hosting ecosystem think, what they build with, and why they choose the tools they choose. I was forced, in the best possible way, to become a tourist.
I wrote about this shift in a blog post called “The World Outside of WordPress.” The core idea was simple: adopt a tourist mentality. Visit other platforms. Learn how they solve problems. You don’t have to move there permanently. I started experimenting with Statamic, Craft, Sanity. I dug deeper into the headless approach and technologies like Buildpacks that I’d never had a reason to touch before.
Every CMS community has solved problems that other communities haven’t even named yet. The way Sanity thinks about structured content is fundamentally different from how WordPress approaches it. Craft’s developer experience priorities come from a completely different set of assumptions. These aren’t better or worse choices. They’re different perspectives shaped by different communities with different needs.
When you only attend events for one platform, you only hear solutions framed in that platform’s language. You start thinking every problem looks like a hook that needs a filter. But the moment you sit in a room with someone building on a headless CMS, or someone who chose a static site generator for reasons you never considered, your mental model expands. Not because your tool was wrong, but because you finally see the shape of what you didn’t know.
That tourist mentality didn’t make me love WordPress less. It made me understand it better. And it planted a question I couldn’t shake: what if we got all these communities in the same room?
What WordCamps Got Right
That question probably makes you wonder: so what’s wrong with WordCamps? Nothing. That’s actually the point.
WordCamps shaped who I am as a developer. They’re the reason I have a career, a network, and frankly, most of my friends in tech. If you’ve never been to one, here’s what makes them different from every other tech conference I’ve attended: they’re organized entirely by volunteers. Not by corporate event teams with sponsorship decks and lead-gen goals. By people who care about the community and show up on weekends to make it happen.
And the ticket prices reflect that philosophy. WordCamps are intentionally affordable so that students, freelancers, creators, and startups can participate. Not just the people whose companies have conference budgets. That’s a deliberate choice, and it matters more than most people realize.
What you can’t fake
WordCamp culture produces real relationships, not transactions. I’ve watched partnerships form, open-source projects launch, and actual businesses grow from conversations that started over lunch at a WordCamp. Contributor Days, where people sit down together to write documentation, translate plugins, test patches, or design interfaces, are something I haven’t seen replicated anywhere else in tech. The whole vibe is collaboration over competition, and somehow it actually works.
That warmth, that openness, that “community first, always” attitude? That’s precisely what I want to bring to CMS Conf.
What if the problem isn’t that WordCamps aren’t good enough, but that they’re so good that other CMS communities deserve something similar? When I talked about adopting a “tourist mentality” and visiting other ecosystems, one thing I kept noticing was how isolated many of those communities felt. Drupal has DrupalCon, TYPO3 has its own events, but the overlap between them? Almost nonexistent.
CMS Conf doesn’t exist because WordCamps failed. It exists because WordCamps proved that a volunteer-driven, community-first conference format can create something worth copying. I just want to widen the circle.
The Product Bubble Problem
The irony is that the thing making these communities so strong, the deep shared identity, shared language, shared events, is also what keeps them from learning from each other.
You learn WordPress at WordCamps. Drupal at DrupalCon. TYPO3 at TYPO3 events. Each community develops its own vocabulary, its own best practices, its own assumptions about how content management should work. And those assumptions rarely get challenged by outside perspectives, because there’s no room where the challenge can happen.
This isn’t anyone’s fault. It’s just how product communities naturally evolve. But the side effects are real.
The Best Ideas Live at the Edges
What if the WordPress community’s approach to contributor onboarding could transform how Drupal welcomes newcomers? What if Sanity’s structured content philosophy could reshape how WordPress developers think about data modeling? What if the accessibility work happening in one ecosystem has already solved a problem another ecosystem hasn’t even identified?
That kind of knowledge transfer doesn’t happen inside the bubble. It happens at the edges, in the spaces between communities, where someone from one world gets curious about how another world works.
I started hearing this from other people, too. At various conferences over the past couple of years, the same conversation kept surfacing: “Why isn’t there a place where all the CMS communities can actually talk to each other?” Not to compete. Not to argue about market share. Just to learn.
The Demand Is Real
What convinced me this wasn’t just my own restlessness was seeing it validated externally. Boye & Company has been running cross-CMS gatherings since 2023 (CMS Kickoff, CMS Connect, and CMS Summit). In 2026 they launched a dedicated Open Source CMS Conference on top of it all, explicitly calling it “the missing gathering place for the open source CMS community.”
Then there’s the developer sentiment data. Stack Overflow has tracked “dreaded” technologies for years, tools that developers use but would rather not. WordPress has been a fixture on that list. I don’t read that as a doom signal for WordPress. I read it as curiosity. Developers want to know what’s out there. They want to compare approaches, understand tradeoffs, and make informed choices rather than staying with a tool simply because it’s the one they learned first.
The product bubble isn’t just a WordPress thing. Every CMS community has one. And the only way to see it clearly is to step outside and look back.
The AI Era Makes This Urgent
The product bubble was always an intellectual loss. But in 2026, it’s becoming a practical one too, because AI just collapsed the switching cost that kept everyone locked in their lane.
A year ago, picking up a new CMS meant weeks of fumbling through documentation, learning conventions, and rebuilding muscle memory. Today? You ask an AI assistant to scaffold a project in Payload or Sanity, and you’re productive within hours.
When learning a new tool took months, sticking with what you knew made economic sense. I spent 15+ years inside WordPress. I understood its hooks, its quirks, its silent failures. Why would I risk productivity to explore something unfamiliar? But AI has quietly demolished that argument. It’s now actually easier to pick the right tool for a job rather than forcing the tool you already know into every project.
The Market Is Already Fragmenting
Astro more than doubled its npm downloads from 4.59 million in January 2026 to 9.24 million by April. The “None” category in CMS detection tools keeps growing, meaning more sites are built with static generators, frontend frameworks, or AI-generated code that doesn’t register as any traditional CMS at all.
The web isn’t consolidating around fewer platforms. It’s splintering into more of them. And if you’re only paying attention to one ecosystem, you’re missing most of the picture.
Agentic AI Is the Real Differentiator
What if I told you the biggest CMS differentiator in 2026 isn’t page builders or plugin ecosystems? It’s AI agent infrastructure. Contentful, Sanity, and Storyblok now ship MCP servers and agent APIs, letting AI tools interact directly with content pipelines. Platforms without an AI integration story already look dated.
This isn’t a future prediction. It’s happening right now, across platforms most of us have never seriously evaluated. And that’s exactly the problem with staying inside your bubble. While you’re debating whether your favorite CMS should add AI features, three other platforms already shipped them, solved the edge cases, and moved on to the next problem.
Same Questions, Different Starting Points
We didn’t plan the CMS Conf lineup around AI as a theme. It just showed up everywhere. Adrian Stelmach is talking about “Evolving CMS Architecture in the Age of AI.” Jakub Jabłoński asks “How We Built a CMS for the AI Era.” Paul Popus presents “Payload as an AI-native CMS.” Anthony Poliseno explores how structured content unlocks real AI workflows. Luis Fernandez goes further with “No Authors. No Pages. No CMS. More Content Than Ever. Welcome to 2030.”
These aren’t theoretical talks from analysts. They’re practitioners building real products across different platforms, arriving at similar questions from completely different starting points. Same problem, wildly different approaches. And right now, most of us only see one approach because we only attend one community’s events.
The AI era doesn’t just make a cross-CMS conference interesting. It makes it necessary. The tools are evolving too fast, across too many platforms, for any single community to track alone.
What the Speaker Lineup Tells You
That’s the argument, anyway. Here’s where it got real for me: when the speaker applications started arriving and I could actually see what happens when you open a CMS conference to everyone.
The Platforms Tell the Story
The roster spans 10+ distinct CMS platforms and technologies. WordPress is well-represented, sure. But so is Astro, Payload, Drupal, TYPO3, Sitecore. Dawid Urbański is talking about Publr, a CMS running at the edge. Matt Kane is presenting EmDash, a CMS built for the serverless and AI era. Emiliano Pisu is showing off dout.dev, a vanilla CMS built from scratch. Pati Walencik is sharing war stories from migrating Zendesk Knowledge.
That’s not a WordPress conference with guest appearances. That’s a room where fundamentally different architectural philosophies will collide.
The Topics Go Way Beyond Code
I mentioned earlier that different CMS communities have solved distinct problems others haven’t even named yet. The talk titles prove it.
Piotr Mońka is presenting “The CMS A11y Matrix: Choosing the Right Engine for an Inclusive Web.” Not accessibility within one CMS, but a comparative framework across platforms. Mathias Bolt Lesniak is tackling “Digital Sovereignty by Design,” a topic that barely registers at most WordPress events but is critical in European enterprise CMS decisions. Simon Kraft asks “Who Owns the Plugin That Broke Production?” which gets at open-source sustainability in a way that transcends any single ecosystem.
And then there’s Rodolfo Melogli with “A CMS Is Nothing Without Community.” Coming from someone deep in the WooCommerce world, that title captures exactly why this conference exists.
The Talks That Capture the Thesis
A few talk titles made me think, “Yes, that’s exactly what I was trying to articulate when we started planning this.”
Alejandro Moreno Lopez: “Bursting the Bubble: Why Code Alone Won’t Save the Open Web.” That’s the conference thesis distilled into a single sentence. Szymon Kuzniak: “The Game of the CMSes,” which I can only assume involves comparing ecosystems head-to-head. Michał Strześniewski is asking the most provocative question of all: “Do I still need a CMS?”
And Tammie Lister’s talk is called “The CMS Humans Need.” Not the CMS with the best benchmark scores. The CMS humans actually need. That framing only makes sense when you’re looking across all platforms, not optimizing within one product.
The lineup isn’t curated to prove a point. It proves the point by existing.
Come to Gdynia
CMS Conf 2026 happens November 12-14 in Gdynia, Poland, at the Pomorski Park Naukowo-Technologiczny. Three days. Two lecture tracks and hands-on workshops covering a vast number of topics. Consultations, demos, an exhibition area, and yes, an afterparty. We’re expecting 300+ attendees from across Europe, and if the speaker lineup is any indication, the conversations in the hallways will be just as good as the talks on stage.
Tickets are available at cart.easy.tools/checkout/cmsconf/cms-conf-2026 — use the code CTRL-ALT-DISCOUNT for 20% off. Bring your tourist mentality. Leave the bubble at home.
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