Pooka & Co at WordCamp Europe 2025
6 June 2025
A Digital Dispatch by Marcus Wilson, Director
Pooka & Co’s Founder and Co-Director, Marcus, reports from WordCamp Europe 2025.
WordCamp Europe is the annual European Congress for WordPress users and contributors. It’s the biggest event in the WordPress calendar – often much larger than the annual WordCamp in the United States.
This year the WordCamp has come to Basel in Switzerland – just a fortnight after the Eurovision Song Contest came to town.
TLDR: Highlights in Brief
- WordCamp Europe 2025 brought together thousands of WordPress developers, designers, and digital thinkers from around the world.
- Pooka & Co joined to share insights, learn from the community, and bring back fresh ideas for our clients in the third sector.
- Key themes included AI in web development, accessibility, open source sustainability, and community collaboration.
- The event reinforced why open-source tools like WordPress are powerful for charities, public bodies, and good causes.
- For Pooka, it was about more than tech — it was about connection, learning, and bringing human-first digital back home.
WordCamp provides a unique opportunity to get inspired by talks, learn from workshops, come together to solve problems – and to generally gauge the health of the WordPress project and community. There’s something for everyone, whether you use WordPress to edit your website or whether you are an experienced developer.
For those of you that don’t know about WordPress – where have you been for the last 22 years? WordPress is the world’s leading open source website editor, and it now powers over 43% of all websites online.
It’s open source software, which means that it’s build by and for its users – and it’s freely available to download and build on as a starting point for your next web project, with no ongoing license fees.
But with great freedom comes great responsibility, and most of the nearly 1,800 attendees at WordCamp will be giving their time for free during the event to help make WordPress even better – whether that’s by contributing code to the WordPress project, writing documentation or helping to improve the security or accessibility of WordPress.
At Pooka & Co, we use WordPress as the starting point to build the majority of our custom web projects, and for over a decade now, I’ve been coming along to WordCamp Europe. In fact, I attended the very first WordCamp back in 2013 in the beautiful city of Leiden in the Netherlands.
Since then, WordCamp has taken me to Sofia, Vienna, Belgrade, Athens and Turin. In 2019, I even volunteered as an Organiser of WordCamp Europe in Berlin, which remains the largest WordPress event ever, drawing 2,734 attendees from nearly 100 countries.
Before that I had helped organise some local WordPress meetups back in Scotland, but nothing could have prepared me for the planning and work involved in organising a European WordCamp! However, it’s the community of volunteers and contributors that have helped WordPress to grow to become nearly half of the web.
This year is quite special for me because, for so many years, it was just myself attending WordCamp on behalf of Pooka & Co. But over recent years, Pooka & Co has grown, and this year we’re represented by five members of our team – including my co-Director Paul, Sian, Andrei and Lidia.
A number of our team work remotely, so WordCamp is a great opportunity to spend some quality time together each year – to get inspired, make plans for the coming year and, just as importantly to have some fun.
Over the next few days we hope to bring you a flavour of this year’s WordCamp through our social channels and through our website.
We hope you are inspired too – and we might even see you at a WordCamp somewhere in 2026!
FAQs: Your Questions About WordCamp (and Why It Matters)
It’s the biggest annual gathering of the global WordPress community, with talks, workshops, and networking on everything from new features to best practices in web development.
We went to stay ahead of the curve in open-source innovation, connect with the WordPress community, and bring back practical insights that will benefit the charities and organisations we work with.
Fresh ideas around accessibility, AI, and ethical digital practices — and renewed inspiration to keep building websites and digital tools that serve humans first, not just algorithms.
