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WordCamp Canada 2025

This past week was the 2nd edition of WordCamp Canada (affectionately known by the hashtag on “the socials”).

Organizing

It was my honour last year to be part of the organizing committee for WordCamp Canada. We had a great team led by Shanta Nathwani, Matthew Graham and myself.

Even with a great team, organizing an event like this is a huge amount of work. So this year I decided to step back from organizing, and instead volunteered.

The 2025 organizing committee led by James Giroux did a fantastic job putting together this year’s camp. My personal thank you to Miriam Goldman, this year’s volunteer coordinator, for making that experience a great one!

Members of the organizing team standing on a flight of stairs overlooking the audience.
The 2025 Organizing Committee during end of camp thank yous.

The Venue

This year’s WordCamp was held in Richcraft Hall at Carleton University in Ottawa. Although this was WordCamp Canada’s first time here, WordCamp Ottawa has used this venue several times for the local camp.

Not only is it a beautiful building (the patio overlooking the river is particularly stunning), but Carleton University itself uses WordPress for hundreds of sites that make up the carleton.ca web presence.

View of the rail and pedestrian bridges over the water.  A multi-use pathway in the foreground.
View from the patio at Richcraft Hall / Carleton University (Photo: Shawn Hooper)

Contributor Day

WordCamp Canada hosted a Contributor Day. This is an event dedicated contributing back to the WordPress open source project. This could be working on the core product, documentation, accessibility, translations, or many other teams.

I chose to work on the WP-CLI command line project, adding the ability to delete all comments from a site with an --all flag on the wp comment delete command. As of the time of writing this post, the pull request for this feature is almost ready to be merged.

I’m hoping someone will put together a list of all the contributors that were worked on during WordCamp Canada.

The Content

Like most WordCamps, I don’t spend a huge amount of time in the talks themselves. I prefer to network in the “Hallway Track”, or volunteer where needed.

I was able to catch parts of several talks over the two days of the camps.

The team put together a lineup of talks across a wide range of topics.

Ryan Welcher presenting “The Block Developer Cookbook: WCEH 2025 Edition”

To nobody’s surprise, AI was a hot topic of discussion this year, but the camp covered:

  • Accessibility
  • AI
  • Business
  • DevOps
  • Development (Blocks, etc.)
  • Documentation
  • Federation
  • SEO

as well as three keynote talks, and a town hall with one of the co-founders of WordPress.

Carl Alexander presenting “Serverless WordPress Demystified: Scale, Savings & Modern Workflows”

My Takeaways

The WordPress Community in Canada is still going strong. The attendees this year were mostly first timers, with a solid group of returning attendees.

Sound like Fun?

It’s likely that the next WordCamp Canada will happen somewhere else in the country. Like WordCamp US, we’d planned to have the camp in the same city two years in a row. I’m thinking… west coast?

If you’re interested in helping out, reach out on the WordCamp Canada site, or on WordPress Canada’s Slack. They’ll be looking for organizers from around the country to help put 2026 together!

2 Comments

  1. Thank you for your thoughts and your help this year Shawn – much appreciated – especially the running around you did for us!

    Cathy

    • Shawn Hooper Shawn Hooper

      Happy to help! It’s much easier when you’re a local to the host city!

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