WordCamp Asia 2025: It’s All About The People
WordCamp Asia 2025 was a success like last year and the year before too, both for the number of attendees and the quality of the talks and speakers. More importantly, it reminds us what has helped WordPress become the undisputed #1 CMS: the people.
Speaking of which, the organizing team deserves a big round of applause for delivering a flawless experience. Undoubtedly, there were all kinds of issues and dramas behind the scenes, but nothing anyone noticed. The food served was so good too! Filipinos are great cooks, not to mention hospitable, polite, and awesome WordPress developers.
Thoughts About the Opening Keynote
Matías Ventura, Lead Architect of the Gutenberg project, explained how WordPress should move forward while remaining true to its essence. It was an interesting talk. Quite academic – I felt as if I was back at University listening to a lecture.
He spoke of the importance of bringing clarity, and that one has to embark on a journey to find answers. He mentioned Theseus’s Paradox, whether an object is the same after having all of its original components replaced over time (as Wikipedia explains), and referenced Picasso a couple of times.
He talked about the quest for simplicity, how to change without changing, and finding the shape of things by decomposing them – like Picasso’s study of a cow, as you can see in the photo below.
Matías Ventura, Lead Architect of the Gutenberg project
Here’s the problem. Talking about Gutenberg philosophically doesn’t quite answer the questions people have: when are x, y, and z features going to be added, and when are they going to be completed?
I spoke to several developers and product owners about the talk and the feedback was consistent: great idea, still needs a lot of work, and is too complicated to use now.
Most of the cheerleaders seem to be agencies and freelancers working on big-budget projects, or WordPress product developers creating a ‘layer’ on top of Gutenberg to make it more usable and feature-rich. For example, block-based page builders, which I covered in my Why Businesses and Agencies Choose WPBakery blog post.
It will be interesting to hear what Matías or someone else working on Gutenberg will say about its roadmap and progress at the next flagship – WordCamp Europe 2025.
Discussing the Future of WordPress
This has been top of mind in the community recently, so it’s no surprise that the theme is reflected in a couple of talks. Many questions are being raised, and not just at WordCamps, about the future of the platform from both technical and business perspectives (as we keep an eye on WordPress’ market share).
At WordCamp Asia this year, there were a couple of interesting talks on the topic:
- The Future: Why the Open Web Matters, by Aaron Campbell
- Keynote Panel: WordPress in 2030
- DataViews and DataForms: The future of structured content in WordPress, by Riad Benguella
You can view the recordings of these talks, and every other one on YouTube.
The future of WordPress is being discussed outside of WordCamps extensively too. Noel Tock, who participated in two panels, shared some ideas in his WordPress in 2025 report, published earlier this month. Discussions are ongoing in many WordPress communities online, and it’s fair to say that they are driven by uncertainty.
There’s a lot of concern about the ongoing #WPDrama too – most developers I spoke to mentioned that they have or will be exploring other options as a way to mitigate risks.
My thoughts about this are somewhat conservative. On one hand, WordPress needs to innovate. And it does. The slow pace of Gutenberg’s development is countered by the speed developers are going to market with new solutions, many of which are built on top of Gutenberg.
Underpinning all of this is a very solid foundation: the way we have been using WordPress for the last 20+ years. Agencies and businesses still use Themes. Developers still prefer PHP over React. Page builders still rule.
WordPress is a bit like a bicycle, which was developed in the 1880s, and has remained the same. Indeed, we have electric versions now, and maybe drone-powered hovering versions will be sold in the near future, but the good ol’ fashioned bicycle is always going to be available as a cheap, effective mode of transportation.
Catching up with WPBakery customers
We didn’t have a stand in the sponsor hall, but I did walk around with my WPBakery t-shirt on day one. Given that more than 5M websites are built using our page builder, I was bound to bump into a customer or two, and so I did.
Agency customers Nakul Chandra and Piyush Patel
From left to right: Nakul, Piyush, and yours truly.
Nakul is the founder of Dallas Web Agency and offers a range of white-label development, creative, and marketing services to other agencies.
Piyush heads up the technical delivery team at Island Wizards, an Ecommerce solution agency.
Both are using WPBakery where it makes sense: where non-technical customers need a page builder that they can use without training to create and update content quickly.
Jean Andrea Nobleza of the Wizard Group
Jean Andrea was one of many local attendees
Jean works for the Wizard Group, an IT and cybersecurity consulting firm headquartered in the UK with an office in Manila.
She is a Web Developer and SEO Specialist (a great combo) and a fan of WPBakery’s simplicity and robustness.
We discussed the advantages WPBakery has over other page builders and agreed that “not breaking layouts” was one of the main ones.
Like most developers I have spoken to, Jean uses different tools for different projects, also considering how easy or hard it is to hand over those tools to clients.
Honorable mention: Michelle Frechette
Catching up with Michelle Frechette
Michelle isn’t a WPBakery customer but an all-around WordPress superstar who contributes to the project and spearheads initiatives such as Underrepresented in Tech and Big Orange Heart.
She pointed out that she had recently visited an eCommerce store called Love Luxury and checked whether it was powered by WordPress or Shopify—only to find that it was built using WPBakery. We agreed that their handbag collection is lovely but a tad too pricey.
Michelle was on the Campfire: Is AI a magic button? panel which is worth a watch if you’re interested in AI and how it can work with WordPress.
WordCamp Asia 2025: Photo Gallery
Final thoughts
In his closing remarks, Matt Mullenweg was asked the same question from a previous keynote panel: Where will WordPress be in 2030?
He discussed how AI would progress and how generative AI would create content on the fly. He then passed the question to Matías Ventura, who jokingly claimed he hoped Gutenberg would be finished by then.
Matt emphasized that “Outside of Gutenberg, we haven’t had a roadmap that extends beyond six months to a year because the world changes in unpredictable ways.“
I wonder if this is the same strategy that commercial software companies use in their product development planning. I suspect Wix knows precisely where they will be in 2030 and every step along the way.
Roger Montti of Search Engine Journal highlighted the lack of long-term planning in his article “WordCamp Asia: No Plans For WordPress In 5 Years.”
“At a WordCamp Asia Q&A, Matt Mullenweg couldn’t answer where WordPress will be in five years. Had to ask someone else, who also didn’t know.”
Open source presents its challenges, of course. Resources are limited, and coordination is more difficult. However, can we come together and agree on a high-level roadmap for the next five years—something other than “we’ll figure it out as we go along”?
The truth is, it doesn’t matter. WordPress has innovated and thrived even without Gutenberg, and I believe it will continue to do so for the next five years. Matt explains at the beginning of his keynote that it’s the people who keep him passionate about the project. I wholeheartedly agree, but I want to add this: it’s the people who are driving the project forward.
