The biggest WordPress event this year will likely not be a WordCamp. Huh? This year marks a well thought out plan to bring WordPress to more business masses than ever (at least at a conference level). What is this event that some in the WordPress community have never heard of but has been going on for years albeit without a WordPress focus?

WordPress and CloudFest

I actually wrote about this in 2021 when due to Covid we had a Virtual CloudFest, TLDR;

CloudFest has a long history and gone by a few different names. It pivoted to CloudFest in 2018. They have a great history page which will do better justice than I could, suffice it to say that it is an enormous in-person conference with networking and business “dealings” beyond compare. I did a CloudFest overview on the organization when it was sold by GoDaddy earlier this year. Oh, it’s also held in a German theme park. THEME PARK! Yes I sent you to the original German language version in that link, enjoy the attractions bei Deutschlands Grösster Freizeitpark 😀

For 2023, CloudFest (which will have 1000s of attendees, my over-under is 5000), kicks off the conference with WordPress Day on March 20. You can see the agenda here but I would like to spotlight the speakers (in order of appearance):

• Jonathan Wold, CEO, Guildenberg (speaker and moderator in multiple sessions)
• Jan Löffler, CTO, Plesk
• Ben Gabler, CEO, Rocket.net
• Oliver Sild, CEO, Patchstack
• George Egri, CEO, BitNinja
• Matt Cromwell, co-Founder, GiveWP
• Leoni Rossberg, Managing Director, Groundbreaker
• Dennis Kittrell, VP Product, CloudLinux
• Till Krüss, CEO, CacheWerk
• Theodoros Filippidis, Strategic Product Manager, Virtuozzo
• Jesse Friedman, Head of WP Cloud, Automattic

and yours truly will be moderating the separate panels on Generosity and Performance.

But wait, that’s not all. There are a number of WordPress sessions throughout the agenda, culminating with Fireside Chat with Josepha Haden Chomphosy. This is a ton of WordPress content and shows a maturity in the ecosystem that most would not have foreseen even just a few years ago.

And one more “session” …

Yes there is a pre-CloudFest event, it’s CloudFest Hackathon v6.0. A number of the selected project have WordPress as their platform, check out all of the projects. Last year was my first hackathon and it’s great to see the upgrade from version 5 to version 6 with two experienced hackers assisting project leads: Alain Schlesser and Lucas Radke.

It’s going to be an exhausting week! Hope to meet you there!