From their page:

As a Founding Contributor, your Gravatar and dofollow link will appear in our sponsors section on all website pages. Plus, you’ll receive a credit worth double your donation toward attending the next edition! Be celebrated as one of the people who made this event possible.

You can contribute as little as EUR 15.

Contribute here: https://checkoutsummit.com/product/checkout-summit-2026-founding-contributor/

View it here: State of WordPress Security In 2026

A couple of notes about how it’s packaged and not the content:

• They have been running it a few years now. It helped them put their brand on map and now re-asserts them as leaders in the WordPress security space
• It’s not gated. They will get more eyeballs and engagement, which in the medium and long term is more valuable than capturing leads
• The report is readable but has nice splashes of colour and animation
• There’s no navigation except a CTA to get protection (best solution) to what the report is a about (scary problem)
• Graphs are gorgeous, easy to read an meaningful. Assets to share and distribute on the socials.
• Social proof on steroids: testimonials from the influencers that WP influencers are influenced by

I’d love to know to what extend this drives brand awareness and net new business.

Block out March 12th for WP:26 — a free virtual event with a seriously strong lineup.

Mary Hubbard (WordPress Executive Director), Steph Yiu (WordPress VIP CEO), and enterprise teams from CERN, News UK, and PMC will be joining sessions on agentic WordPress, GEO and the future of search, accessibility, and the state of the web in 2026.

It’s worth noting — as a compliment to Human Made — that this is exactly the kind of event the WordPress project itself should be running to promote WordPress for enterprise. Strategic, forward-looking, and aimed at the people making real platform decisions. Kudos to them for stepping up and doing it so well.

👉 https://humanmade.com/wordpress-in-2026-event/

It kinda feels like Human Made are WordPress.org’s Enterprise Marketing department…

I haven’t read the report, but no doubt it’s going to be insightful – their content always is.

Here’s the blurb on their landing page:

“WordPress is entering a new era. Not with one big launch, but through a convergence of themes that will shape how enterprise teams build, govern, and scale digital experiences.”

Get the report here.

I’m excited to share some changes to our membership plans and a new community feature called Discuss.

The Community tier is no more and everyone has been upgraded to Pro. With a Pro Membership you can:

✅ Access to Member-Only Content
✅ Post Comments to blog posts and Notes
✅ Post in the Notepad
✅ Publish a Member Profile
✅ Participate in our Private Community called Discuss
✅ Sign up for Events

I am hoping by removing the cost ‘barrier’ to content, features and participation more folks will join and help each other grow and thrive. That’s our mission.

If you’re an organization and want more visibility on this platform, the Partner Membership tier gives you:

✅ A Company Profile
✅ Job & Project Postings
✅ Publish Press Releases & Announcements
✅ Partner-Exclusive Events
✅ Partner Offers & Discounts

That’s plenty of value there for only $199 / year, and you get to support a publication that doesn’t compromise on quality and sell its soul to affiliate marketing.

How to join

Membership is exclusively for people working in the WordPress ecosystem. I check every application. You can apply here.

Today I learned that Guildenberg shut down.

Their mission was to help businesses grow in the WordPress ecosystem, and the model collaborative.

“Becoming a member of the guild provides you a shared space to collaborate with other members, supported by the Guildenberg team, all focused on helping you grow.”

The reason for closure is not entirely clear to me, but that two of the three co-founders joined Convesio in senior roles.

And that’s the story I am interested in, having worked at Convesio. They’ve hired some seriously talented people – Tammy and Jonathan are at the top of their game.

It will be interesting to track Convesio’s growth in 2026.

If you missed it watching it live, which you would have as they had technical issues with the streaming, here’s the recorded video: State of the Word 2026.

It’s two hours long. I’ve viewed about half of it, starting with Matt Mullenweg’s keynote. My main takeaway is that the project is laying the foundation for AI and is on track with delivering core functions.

The Repository has published a great roundup:

State of the Word 2025: AI, Education, and a Community Holding Steady Through a “Rollercoaster” Year

You can currently get Partner Membership for $99/year instead of $499 — and that rate is locked in for life.

The Partner tier is designed for organizations that want more visibility on WP BizDev and the opportunity to network and learn from other growth-focused professionals in our private community.

Partner Membership includes:

• A Partner Profile in our Directory
• Unlimited announcements
• Unlimited job postings
• Monthly online meetups for Partners
• Access to our private Partner Community
• Partner-only discounts

Plus, you’ll receive three free Pro Memberships for your team (normally $99/year each).

Get the deal here.

Rodolfo Melogli is organizing Checkout Summit; the “first independent IRL conference for WooCommerce Makers” – if you work with WooCommerce or Ecommerce more generally, this is one for you.

You should attend just to experience Palermo, which is a great city. I’m Italian, so can vouch for that 🙂

What struck me in the interview is that Rodolfo mentions that AI has killed his business. He’s referring to the publishing side 0f Business Bloomer, which he grew over the years by publishing very high quality content… that no doubt that AI has scraped to ‘learn’ more about WooCommerce and provide answers directly.

(An aside before I forget, if you’re a publisher or publishing is a key Marketing strategy, you should follow State of Online Publishing)

In the interview Rodolfo mentions that there haven’t really been any in-person WooCommerce events for a while. He’s fixing that with Checkout Summit. He also mentioned the growing number of independent (non-WordCamp) events that are being organised, and I think we can all agree that a reason for that is that online has become noisy, busy and often ineffective as a grow driver.

You can listen to the interview here – I highly recommend it.

If you can, go to the event. It promises to be great for content, connecting and stuffing your face with the best food Italy offers 🙂

James works for WordPress VIP and neck deep into the WordPress for Enterprise space, which is very different from what most folks in the ecosystem know. He blog post – Enterprise Doesn’t Doubt WordPress. They Doubt Us – highlights a couple of important points:

“WordPress is ready for the enterprise moment ahead, but our ecosystem isn’t telling the right story.”

and…

“Enterprise Doesn’t Need Another CMS Pitch. They Need A Vision.”

and…

“Agencies are on the Front Line of What Comes Next”

and… many more great points. Read the article, already! 🙂

I also agree that the project is well placed for the AI-future, whatever that is. The platform is structurally ready for it, and the very nature of its open development model means it can iterate faster than closed and commercially-driven propriety systems.

James also makes a critical point that agencies serving any market segment (so not just Enterprise) should consider:

We have the credibility. We have the track record. We have the logos and the scale and the years of proof. What we need now is the mindset shift; to operate more like GSIs and less like implementers. To walk into enterprise environments not with a list of WordPress features, but with a point of view on how to solve the problems that sit across the martech stack.

Teams want full-pipeline thinking. They want integration strategy. They want help navigating governance, orchestration, data flow, and collaboration. They want someone to understand how their content interacts with the rest of their systems and how it ultimately contributes to business outcomes.

WordPress fits into that world far more naturally than most people realise. It’s flexible, it’s interoperable, it’s structured when you need it to be and open when you want to innovate. But it only reaches its potential when we position it as part of the martech ecosystem, not standing apart from it.

I talked about something similar at this year’s Agency Summit in the context of AI and businesses needing to integrate and orchestrate solutions together.

And even in my recent interview of Shoaib Khan Khattak of  CyberPanel, discussing how agencies can package a WordPress + n8n offering.

I’m looking at this from the point of view of a small agency or a freelance dev. If you think with a more “Enterprise mindset” you’ll end up with a stronger and more appealing offering for smaller businesses. And eventually land Enterprise clients too. Not only that, you’re doing WordPress a favour, helping change the ‘free is crappy’ perception.

One final point.

James says that the ecosystem is not telling the right story. I agree with 100%. But I also think that the project should lead this endeavour.  The project needs Marketing.