Open Source CMS 26 Conference Program

The inaugural vendor-neutral conference for the open source CMS community

The conference is tailored for digital leaders from the global open source CMS community and features 2 packed days with a carefully curated mixture of talks, workshops, activities and world class facilitators, thought-provokers, speakers and session leads.

Unlike many other conferences, this one is not about speakers talking endlessly about their own work. Rather than being talked at, this is your conference for active participation and connecting with your peers with the goal to move things forward.

Final Program as it happened

Tuesday, October 20

7:30 - 9:00 Utrecht morning coffee walk

Kick off the conference with a morning walk through Utrecht and join us for a cup of coffee at a charming cafe.

We meet at the conference venue: Stadsklooster Utrecht

9:00 - 9:30 Breakfast and registration

Join us early, get the conversation started, make some new friends and enjoy some refreshments.

9:30 - 9:45 Welcome & opening

By our host Janus Boye, Boye & Co, who will also answer the question of why this room has never existed before and why it matters

Open source CMS is at a crossroads. AI is changing how content is created, managed and discovered. Agentic workflows are challenging traditional assumptions about what a CMS does and who uses it. Meanwhile, competition from proprietary platforms is intensifying, raising important questions about the future of open source.

As a partner at Open Strategy Partners and a long-standing contributor to the open source ecosystem, Jeffrey A. "jam" McGuire brings a vendor-neutral perspective on the opportunities, challenges and changes shaping the industry.

In this opening keynote, Jam will connect the dots across the open source CMS landscape.

• Where is meaningful innovation happening?

• Are open source communities collaborating enough to compete with proprietary alternatives?

• How might AI reshape the role of content management?

• What does this mean for the organisations and people relying on these platforms?

Drawing on developments across different projects and communities, Jam will distinguish lasting shifts from passing hype, challenge conventional thinking and consider what the next chapter of open source CMS might look like.

You will leave with a clearer picture of where open source CMS stands today, the opportunities and threats ahead, and the developments and decisions worth paying attention to as we head into 2027.

10:15 - 10:40 The four big projects: State of Drupal, Joomla, TYPO3 and WordPress

A fast-paced rundown of where each project stands right now - roadmap highlights, recent releases, and what's coming next for Drupal, Joomla, TYPO3 and WordPress back to back in under half an hour.

Short presentations will be given by representatives from each open source community:

10:40 - 11:00 Learning from the entire open source CMS family

An opportunity for all the other projects in the room to share brief updates, hot takes and emerging perspectives

• The AI-Programmable CMS - Webiny

• Measuring the carbon footprint of a CMS - Wagtail

11:00 - 11:30 Coffee & networking

11:30 - 12:30 Breakout sessions - two tracks

Choose your path for this hour. Each track runs three talks, about 20 minutes each, back-to-back before we reconvene.

Track A: Security, regulation & sovereignty
From increased security concerns, via incoming EU regulation to the sovereignty debate, this track covers what compliance and security leaders need to know right now:

1. Security as the centre of our work - led by Sigrid Gramlinger-Moser (AT).

2. Digital sovereignty: Why European institutions choose open source CMS by Mathias Bolt Lesniak (NO)

   Download slides (PDF)

Track B: Content, building bridges
Real-world lessons on managing content across systems and stakeholders:

1. Documentation in an open source project by Milana Cap (Serbia)

2. New directions in content modelling by Marc Salvatierra (US)
   Download slides (PDF)

3. When AI replaces clicks: What comes next for CMS? by Danny Liu (NL) at Europol

12:30 - 13:30 Lunch

13:30 - 14:30 Bird of a feathers - roundtables

Come join an hour of informal roundtable discussions to get answers on your specific questions or help others by sharing your expert knowledge.

Tables:

1. Accessibility by Thibaud Colas

2. AI governance by Cruce Saunders

3. Content engineering towards better GEO led by Rafaela Ellensburg

4. Digital sovereignty by Mathias Bolt Lesniak

5. Documentation by Milana Cap

6. Funding the commons by Andy Adiwidjaja

7. The messy reality of marketing open source CMS by Alejandro Moreno Lopez

8. Enterprise procurement by Karim Marucchi

14:30 - 15:00 Coffee & networking

15:00 - 15:50 How AI changes the game - comparing approaches

Lightning talks at about 10 minutes each on how AI changes the game for open source CMS

1. Stop stuffing the prompt: Building AI features that scale past the context window by Sven Al Hamad from Webiny

2. How AI is reshaping open source CMS communities, creating new opportunities for collaboration while increasing the risk of fragmentation by Andy Adiwidjaja from S2 hub
   
   followed by an open exchange of perspectives on AI, incl. how it changes communities, recent work with Jev, and much more

15:50 - 16:45 Who pays for the commons? Funding models compared

We’ll open with a few lightning talks at about 10 minutes each and move on to an open discussion

1. Where does €1,000,000 go? Budgeting an open source community in public by Olivier Dobberkau (download slides)

2. How funding works in Joomla by Brian Teeman (download slides)

3. How Drupal funds its future: balancing community, contribution and sustainability by Alejandro Moreno

4. Beyond Burnout and Buyouts by Jeffrey A. “jam” McGuire (download slides)

16:45 - 17:00 Coffee & networking

17:00 - 18:00 Live demos

We will end the day with a friendly, fast-moving session celebrating practical work from across the community.

Each demonstration lasts around five minutes, giving us an opportunity to see what technology can actually do and compare different ideas and approaches without the polished sales pitch.

This is not a contest. We want to showcase a varied mix: bold innovations, small features that make a big difference and anything else that looks like genuine progress.

Live demos:

• Authoring with AI in SilverStripe by Andy Adiwidjaja

• Wagtail’s live page QA tools by Thibaud Colas

• New TYPO3 features, also for Gen Z by Benni Mack

• 2 new features not yet released in Webiny by Sven Al Hamad

• WordPress Playground with Milana Cap

• Invisible markup - from unstructured to structured data by Steven Pemberton

18:30 - 22:00 Social event

Join us for an informal networking dinner. Everyone is invited!

Venue: Jasmijn & Ik, Kanaalstraat 219 - about 1 minute walk from the venue

Wednesday, October 21

7:00 Morning Run

We meet together for a relaxed 25 minute run.
Start and finish: In front of Stadsklooster

9:00 - 9:30 Breakfast and networking

Join us early, get the conversation started, reflect on what you’ve already learned and enjoy some freshly brewed coffee and tea.

9:30 - 9:45: Morning welcome

A brief welcome by Janus Boye
and a bonus talk by Tom Cranstoun:
Freely Available, Never Free (download slides)

Steven helped shape HTML, CSS and several of the standards on which today’s web is built. He has seen both what made the early web durable and how far modern development has moved away from some of those original principles.

Open source gives organisations access to their software, but does it ensure that their websites, content and knowledge will remain usable when platforms, frameworks and suppliers disappear?

Drawing on his work in web standards, human-computer interaction and declarative technologies, Steven will challenge us to think beyond the next release cycle. He will examine what makes digital information durable, where unnecessary complexity and dependency have entered the web, and what open source communities can do about it.

Participants will leave with a sharper way to assess whether the systems they build are genuinely open, portable and designed to last.

Continue the conversation:
Open source gives organisations access to their software. It does not automatically ensure that what they build will last

More session details coming shortly.

More session details coming shortly.

10:45 - 11:15 Coffee & networking

11:15 - 12:00 Breakout sessions - two tracks

Choose your track - same time slot, two different conversations.

Track A: The Real competition isn't each other
Making the joint case against proprietary platforms

Track B: Reducing the silo work
How can we collaborate better to focus on what sets us apart and reduce all the work that doesn’t need to happen in silos?

12:00 - 13:30 Lunch

13:30 - 13:45 Lighting talk

Tom Cranstoun on
Towards Open Standards (download slides)

13:45 - 14:10 Continued work in groups

Collaboration across open source CMS for now and the future

For the first time, the leaders of all major open source content management systems are in the same room, alongside agencies, hosts, and practitioners from Europe and North America. This closing session turns two days of conversation into a shared commitment.

Working from the themes that surfaced in the roundtables and lightning tracks, we will draft a short public statement on where the open source CMS projects will act together: security and regulatory readiness on both sides of the Atlantic, from the EU Cyber Resilience Act to emerging US software supply-chain requirements; sustainable funding for the maintainers every organization depends on; accessibility as a global standard rather than a regional obligation; and interoperability between platforms so that content and talent move freely across the ecosystem. Project leads and association representatives will refine the draft live, with input from everyone in the room.

The goal is a one-page document - the "Utrecht Statement" on security, sustainability, and interoperability - signed by the participating projects and published after the conference, sending a clear signal to governments, enterprises, and the wider community worldwide: open source CMS is not a set of competing camps, but a shared, global foundation for the open web.

14.45 - 15:00 Goodbyes and see you next year!

Thanks for joining us. Continue the conversation over a cup of coffee or tea before leaving Utrecht.