I’ve just spent the last few days in Basel, Switzerland with the WordPress community in Europe.
Over 1,700 people from more than 80 countries descended on the heavily diverse city. It sits just inside the Swiss border, but straddles both France and Germany.
I drove from Wales in my converted camper, accompanied by my little toy poodle companion, Archie. This means I didn’t get the experience of landing in Basel airport, but others mentioned that when you exit there’s a sign saying ‘France this way, Switzerland this way’. So when I say diverse, it’s a pretty unique place!
This made it the perfect location to catch up with some of my peers in the WordPress community, particularly those at the peak of digital innovation and developing solutions for the enterprise.
Whenever I go to this sort of thing, I’m always most inspired and recharged by the coffees, lunches, dinners (and yes, sometimes late night kebabs) and strolls through the city.
So that’s where I’m going to focus this reflection… on the key conversations I’ve had with the people at the top of their game in WordPress.
I’ve concentrated it around four themes: market conditions for marketing teams, the agency model, AI in WordPress, and open source resilience.
Let’s dive in.
Market conditions for marketing teams
Generally speaking, it’s been a pretty rough time to be part of a marketing team in the last 6 months. That’s the sentiment from most agency founders and senior leaders that I’ve been chatting with.
If it’s not figuring out how AI plays a part in a modern day marketing strategy (we’ll get to that), it’s having your budget slashed, your projects pulled and your teammates let go.
At Illustrate Digital in the last 12 months we’ve experienced projects ready to get started, the client’s marketing team planning and building up to it for months, and the plug pulled last minute by finance/C-Suite from the nervousness in the global and local markets.
If it’s not global elections, it’s updated government budget statements, and when it’s not struggling economies, it’s Trump’s tariffs.
All of this is a circular economy, and it has impacted everyone.
The positive news behind all of this weirdness and uncertainty, is that everyone I’ve been speaking to seems be optimistic that we’re on our way out of it. Marketing budgets are slowly returning and trade is resuming.
But if you’re a marketer reading this and you’ve been affected by anything I’ve just mentioned… you’re not alone.
The agency model
It seems to me as though the idea of being an ‘agency’ is going through a complete reinvention (again).
The first major impact on the agency model was the drive towards all companies operating as tech companies, and this meant organisations were outsourcing less and less of their tech. Makes sense!
The second impact is the newer generation of agencies and agency visionaries that are driving different, less traditional outcomes (or maybe I should say more modern, relevant outcomes) for their clients. Think social media, influencer marketing, automation.
The next wave of impact will be AI (again, we’ll get to that).
In Daniel Priestly’s book ‘Key Person of Influence’ he talks about their being three components to any market: the outer circle, the core, and the inner circle. Whilst the inner circle makes up only 1% of the market, it often attracts more than its fair share of market share and revenue. The core is then the other top organisations in any market. And the rest is the outer circle, where the majority sits.
I give this context to say that anyone in the outer circle will find themselves struggling more and more, especially the more generic their offering becomes. And that’s my key point about the agency model.
You’re either in the inner circle (very, very hard to achieve), the core (you’ve made yourself focused and niche enough that you’re amongst the best in the space), or you’re going to begin to struggle.
My time in Basel was spent with fellow core and inner circle market players. They’re all very clear about what they do, who they do it for, and the value they can provide to that market.
AI in WordPress
We’ve got to start thinking about AI as more than just interactions with chat windows. It has more potential than Q&As about dog-friendly restaurants in Basel. And it seems like every ‘new AI tool’ I encounter at the moment is just another chat user experience with a repository of data sat behind it.
So thinking about AI as more than just a chat interface is what we should, and can, be expecting of WordPress and of each other as enterprise WordPress agencies.
Firstly on AI, it’s probably good to mention that it was a seriously hot topic in a lot of conversations. It was discussed on stage at the official WordCamp Europe conference, and it was mused upon in my lunches and coffee catch ups.
When ChatGPT made AI accessible to pretty much anyone on the planet, they did something important… they made it relevant and significant to consumers. And love it or hate it, this means there’s now an expectation that AI plays a part in almost everything. Once you’ve experienced efficiency paired with (at least some degree of) accuracy, it’s hard to go back.
It was announced that there’s now an official WordPress AI team, tasked with exploring and implementing AI-powered improvements across areas like form building, content generation and workflow automation.
And when it comes to powering up the WordPress ecosystem, it was also mentioned that AI has helped to double the amount of plugin approvals submitted by developers across the community. Basically meaning more functionality can be released to all WordPress users more quickly.
From an agency perspective, the involvement and potential of AI created a mixed bag of conversations. From “we don’t really know yet” to “we’ve mandated the use of AI for developers.”
My overall reflection is that whilst we still need to be careful about protecting data and intellectual property, we also need to continue to move to explore how AI can add value, improve efficiency and play a significant part in the future of digital.
Open source resilience
This was the biggie. And the one I’m sure had most people musing and talking about the future of open source.
On Friday night, during an Alt Ctrl Org side event of 200+ people, some of the most influential contributors to WordPress launched the FAIR project.
FAIR, which stands for Free and Independent Repositories, is an important initiative that’s aimed at giving plugin and theme developers more freedom and choice in how they share and sell their work within the WordPress ecosystem.
Across the last 12 months there had been some control issues within the WordPress space, leaving developers and site owners alike concerned about their reliance on a single source of data. Whilst hosts like WP Engine improved this for their own customers rather quickly, there still remained questions about central control and resilience of the open source platform we all know, use and love.
The goal of the FAIR project is to create an independent, community-driven plugin and theme repository as an alternative or to complement WordPress.org. Think of it like creating more than one app store so developers and users have options, and the ecosystem stays diverse and healthy.
Importantly, the FAIR project has been backed by the Linux Foundation, which supports some of the world’s most critical open source initiatives like Kubernetes, Node.js, and Linux itself. To someone like me, and to an agency like Illustrate Digital, remaining neutral and developer-focused is viewed as a key part of open source.
It’s early days, but something we’ll be keeping a keen eye on, and something I’d encourage anyone with an interest in WordPress to go and read about: Linux Foundation Announces the FAIR Package Manager Project for Open Source Content Management System Stability
