Another year goes by for #WPLDN. Only 2 weeks since the last event in November, and this one was truly a lot of fun.
There was none of the traditional talks this time around, just light-hearted content, with lots of audience participation.
First up we had a pub quiz. Five rounds of questions which were mostly about WordPress, and mostly accurate! The winning teams got to dip their hands into the ‘sack of s**t’, and go home with a bunch of highly memorable prizes; socks, plastic things with a purpose nobody figured out, and other things which were cherished as far as the door!
We also tried something new, an AI contest.
If you’re in the WordPress space, you’ll know that AI is taking over. In September 2025, Automattic unveiled Telex, an online, chat-based, AI agent which will build a block and then launch it in Playground, ready for you try out. It’s really remarkable.
Two teams competed in increasingly silly challenges to build something with no practical purpose whatsoever.
I was not too sure how it would all work out, but it did, and it was great fun.
Mark Westguard from WS Form was in a team of one, and he was up against four (sometimes five) members of the Filter agency team.
They had ten minutes to build each of the following:
- Festive Fart Roulette: A festive treat or toot. Let the user spin to win, or not.
- Christmas Boggle: A game that allows the user to swipe the words with the mouse. Minimum of one eight-letter word per game, only four-letter words and above accepted.
- An Advent Calendar of Jeopardy: Open the doors of this advent calendar with caution.
- Uncle Dave’s Drunk Christmas Film Review.: A film review generator with a twist, Uncle Dave can’t handle his drink and thinks he knows better than Spielberg.
- Audience participation. The audience decided upon the idea for this round – build a generator for a snowman / Santa / Christmas tree.
Lots of blind alleys, lots of audience gasping and lots of fun.
Mark won (it was a cliff hanger, and went right down to the wire), and got some socks for his troubles. These are likely the most expensive socks he’s ever acquired, given that he flew in from the USA for this!
I think that we’ll run an AI event again in the future.
We also awarded our Golden Ticket prizes (Sony headphones and 4k webcam) to one lucky winner, pretty cool.
Special thanks to all of our sponsors, 20i, Kinsta, Klaviyo, hosting.com, Mollie and Dreamhost. We could not put the event on without your support.
2026 needs fresh sponsors so that we can continue, and you can find out about that on the #WPLDN website.
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