CMS Conf 2026 takes place on 12-14 November 2026 at PPNT Gdynia (Pomeranian Science and Technology Park) in Poland. Workshops run on 12 November, talks on 13 and 14 November, with a Polish track alongside the English one.
Nobody agrees any more on what a CMS is: a page editor, a content API, an AI backend, or something you no longer need. The line-up below is grouped by the question each session answers, and the speakers will not agree with each other. Talk titles are the official ones from the agenda.
CMS Conf 2026 speakers on what a CMS is today
Six speakers, six answers: some say the page is dead, one asks whether you need a CMS at all.
- Luis Fernandez (VML): No Authors. No Pages. No CMS. More Content Than Ever. Welcome to 2030.
- Tammie Lister (Convesio): The CMS Humans Need
- Michał Strześniewski (300.codes): Do I still need a CMS?
- Paweł Zmysłowski: Beyond Publishing: Why You Must Rethink What “CMS” Even Means
- Daniel Stanica: Content Is Not King Anymore. Your CMS Is.
- Adrian Stelmach (explitia): Evolving CMS Architecture in the Age of AI: How to Avoid Locking Yourself In for the Next 5 Years
CMS Conf 2026 speakers on open source beyond its own bubble
WordPress, Drupal and Joomla people mostly talk within their own communities, while all of them fight the same battles: burned-out maintainers, companies that take the code and give nothing back, and proprietary SaaS.
- Alejandro Moreno Lopez (Drupal Association): Bursting the Bubble: Why Code Alone Won’t Save the Open Web
- Elisa Foltyn (Open Source Matters, Joomla): Joomla 6 - Hidden Secrets: Work Smarter, Not Harder
- Marcel Bootsman (Kinsta): Open Source is democratic infrastructure. Support it!
- Rodolfo Melogli (Business Bloomer): A CMS Is Nothing Without Community
- Łukasz Wilczak: Rise and Fall of Open Source CMS: From the Early Web to Today
CMS Conf 2026 speakers who built a new CMS
Every developer has said “I could build a better CMS over a weekend”. These five did not stop on Monday.
- Paul Popus (Figma): Payload as an AI-native CMS. A content model that agents can work with.
- Dawid Urbański (Caraway): Publr: A CMS at the Edge of What’s Possible. A CMS that questions the usual stack of framework, runtime, bundler and hundreds of npm packages.
- Emiliano Pisu (DevDojoIT): dout.dev - how to build a vanilla CMS. A CMS with zero runtime dependencies and no framework.
- Patryk Sawicki (decocode): Trzy warstwy obrony przed spike: jak zaprojektowaliśmy CMS biletowy w Laravelu (Polish track). A ticketing CMS in Laravel, and what happens when 200 people click “buy” in the same millisecond.
- Jakub Jabłoński (Blazity): How We Built a CMS for the AI Era. For teams that do not want to choose between local Markdown files and enterprise-level CMS collaboration.
CMS Conf 2026 speakers on AI in content management
Speakers who shipped something, measured it and can say what broke.
- Anthony Poliseno (Hygraph): The Content Model Beneath the AI: How Structured Content Unlocks Real AI Workflows. The teams getting results have structured content underneath, not necessarily the best AI tool.
- Carlo Daniele (Kinsta): From Sahara Dunes to Code: Architecting AI-Driven Storytelling for Platform-Agnostic Ecosystems
- Lana Rafaela Cindric (Patchstack): Kill the PDF. AI-Powered Marketing That Actually Gets Seen (and How to Maintain It).
- Jovana Smoljanovic Tucakov (Melograno): How AI Transformed SEO & Content Across a 4-Product Ecosystem. How AI changed SEO and content across four products at once.
- Michał Szymoszek (Coditive): Co-authored by Claude, reviewed by reality.
- Nemanja Cimbaljevic: How to Stay Sane When Your AI Is an Improv Performer with a REST API. Confident, fluent and occasionally inventing things.
CMS Conf 2026 speakers on WordPress security and maintenance
Security and updates are the least glamorous part of running a CMS and the most expensive when they go wrong.
- Robert Abela (Melapress): The Attacker That Never Logged In: the Blind Spot in WordPress Security. No guessed password, no broken 2FA, nothing in the activity log, and still someone was in.
- Jakub Herman: Hacking and securing WordPress plugins. By someone who finds vulnerabilities for a living.
- Simon Kraft: Who Owns the Plugin That Broke Production? A current question now that plugins get prompted into existence.
- Wojciech Babicz (Altumhost): Modern (and simple) methods of stealing money on the internet - how to protect yourself
- Maciej Kuchnik (WLC Growth & Care): Myślałem, że będę aktualizował wtyczki - wyobrażenia vs rzeczywistość w pracy na supporcie (Polish track). He thought support meant updating plugins; reality had other plans.
CMS Conf 2026 speakers on frontend and content architecture
What happens in the two seconds after an editor clicks Publish: caches, rebuilds and a content model that either fits the frontend or does not.
- Elian Van Cutsem (Astro): Astro as a Universal CMS Frontend: Patterns, Tradeoffs and a Real-World Case
- Fellyph Cintra (Google Developer Expert): Your CMS in the Browser: How WebAssembly is Changing the Game (and Why Your Ecosystem Should Care). A full CMS running in the browser with WebAssembly, no Docker, no setup.
- Marius Solheim: Publish-Driven Static Frontends: Cache-First Delivery with On-Demand Revalidation. Cache first, revalidate on demand, stop guessing with timers.
- David Eglin: A missing layer in content modelling. Why that layer should be designed before you pick a platform.
- Wojtek Aleksander: UX content as a CMS stress test: Two ontologies, one missing layer. Microcopy looks simple until a classic CMS tries to manage it.
- Karol Sawka (Optimer.io): Anatomia WooPadku (Polish track). An honest look at WooCommerce today.
CMS Conf 2026 speakers on accessibility and working inside a CMS
Talks about the people who work inside a CMS every day: editors with screen readers, developers, tech leads and clients.
- Anne-Mieke Bovelett: One Skill. Serious Market Value. Why Accessible CMS Backends Are Your Next Differentiator. Most accessibility conversations stop at the frontend, but the editing interface is where content gets made.
- Piotr Mońka (Ambiscale): The CMS A11y Matrix: Choosing the Right Engine for an Inclusive Web. How to pick an engine now that the European Accessibility Act is in force.
- Milana Cap (Toptal): WordPress gems for devs: Accessibility with HTML API
- Aleksandra Lemańska (LemanSkills): Debugging Team Communication: The “6 APIs” Framework for Tech Leaders. For tech leads who are better with systems than with people.
- Karolina Tanona (Netivo): Klient nie kupuje kodu, kupuje od Ciebie spokój - czyli o empatycznej komunikacji w IT (Polish track). The client buys peace of mind, not code.
- Katarzyna Janoska: Ło Panie! A kto tu Panu tak s$%&… zepsuł? (Polish track). Lessons from hours of auditing websites left behind by previous contractors.
CMS Conf 2026 speakers on business lessons
Lessons from projects that did not follow the kick-off deck, told by the people who paid for them.
- Raitis Sevelis (WPBakery): Growing the CMS Market: What I Learned After Onboarding 6+ Million Users
- Pati Walencik (Zendesk): A miało być łatwo: prawie dwa lata migracji Zendesk Knowledge do nowego edytora (Polish track). Almost two years of migrating Zendesk Knowledge to a new editor.
- Szymon Kuzniak (ACTUM Digital): The Game of the CMSes. The old king is dying, a heritage luxury brand is at stake, and everyone wants the throne.
- Kacper Krasnodębski: SEO Starts in the CMS. How System Decisions Shape Organic Visibility. URLs, redirects and canonicals are decided long before anyone writes content.
- Mary Czekaj: Spoilt for Choice: Selecting the Right CMS for Your Online Course. How course creators end up on the wrong platform, and what it costs them.
CMS Conf 2026 workshops on 12 November
The first day has no slides to sit through: laptops, real code and people who know the tools from the inside. Matt Kane and Mathias Bolt Lesniak also give talks on 13 and 14 November.
- Matt Kane (Cloudflare): Ship, Automate, Extend: A Hands-On EmDash CMS Workshop. A hands-on workshop from the person building EmDash. Matt Kane also gives the talk “Beyond WordPress: Building EmDash, a CMS for the Serverless and AI Era”.
- Mathias Bolt Lesniak (TYPO3 Project Ambassador): Introduction to Modern TYPO3 Development. If your picture of TYPO3 is ten years old, this updates it. He also gives the talk “Digital Sovereignty by Design”.
- Mike Miler (WebChange Detector): Confident Updates: A Visual Regression Testing Workshop for Agencies. So that “update all” stops being a gamble.
Why travel to CMS Conf 2026 in Gdynia
If you know WordCamps and DrupalCons, this is the room where both communities, plus Joomla, TYPO3, Payload, Astro and EmDash people, sit through the same talks. Six talks run in Polish, the rest in English.
Bring a laptop and a charger for 12 November.
CMS Conf 2026 tickets with 40% off
Tickets are on sale with the WPPoland promo code, which takes 40% off: buy a CMS Conf 2026 ticket with the WPPoland code.
For the engineering side, read the CMS Conf website case study. If you work with WordPress professionally, see the WordPress developer page.
