Looking at our travel plans for Plank in 2025, we decided to attend one WordPress related event. While we were considering events like PressConf, WordCamp US and WordCamp Europe, we decided to stay local this year and invest our time in WordCamp Canada community.
Held for the second year in a row in our nation’s capital, it made for a quick VIA Rail trip from Montreal, accompanied by a 10-minute ride to downtown Ottawa, thanks to their new-ish O-Train.
With this year’s venue change to Carleton University’s Richcraft Hall, the event experience was well elevated. The use of space was solid, the venue was bright, and there was an outdoor area overlooking the Rideau Canal that many people took the opportunity to enjoy.
As with all events we attend professionally, we set goals for ourselves for this trip. With humble goals as a first-time sponsor, we wanted to reach more people and let them know about Plank. It was interesting that, for every person who came up to our booth and knew who we were and what we had done as WordPress developers, there were twice as many who had never heard of us before. After running our company for over 25 years and with 15 years of WordPress experience as an agency, it was surprising, as much as it shouldn’t have been.
While I didn’t get to attend as many of the different speakers as I would have liked, due to mainly sticking around our booth, we did manage to see Matt Mullenweg’s Town Hall. I was also happy to see presentations by some friends who were attending WordCamp Canada as well.
- Evan Prodromou‘s Keynote presentation was on the topic of ActivityPub and WordPress
- Carl Alexander‘s presentation was on Serverless WordPress Demystified: Scale, Savings & Modern Workflows
- Sasha Endoh chose to focus on empowering Content managers to make your website accessible
One of the highlights of WPEH this year was the lunch options and the food in general, which were better than at most events I’ve attended. Most of the time, the food options are either not great or the portions are too small. I liked that they bucked both trends this time around.
In addition to my personal enjoyment of the event, I’m confident that Plank will attend and sponsor again in 2026. We realize that the only way to grow our place in the WordCamp community is to do what comes naturally to us: be available and ready to do what we can to support the community.
If you know of any other WordCamps that are “shouldn’t miss” let us know and we will see if we can fit them into our 2026 schedule. If you want to suggest other independent WordPress or Open Source events we should attend, I would be happy to hear about them.
P.S. You can watch all of the presentation and keynotes at WordPress.tv.