After more than 12 years of working with Joomla, I finally made it to the Joomla World Conference in person. JWC2026 took place in Potsdam, Germany from 16 to 18 October 2026, and I travelled all the way from Ahmedabad, India to be there. Every hour of that journey was worth it.
The Joomla World Conference 2026 was the first in-person global Joomla event in years, and the atmosphere from the very first session made it clear this was something special.
Day One at JWC2026: Opening Session and Deep Dives
The Joomla World Conference opened with an energy that set the tone for everything that followed. Familiar names, new faces, and a shared love for a platform that has been quietly powering some of the most important websites on the open web for two decades.
The first technical session I attended at JWC2026 was Herman Peeren's talk on Model Driven Joomla Development. Herman walked through how to properly use the Model layer in Joomla programming, something that many developers touch without fully understanding. It was one of those sessions that makes you rethink how you have been doing things and want to go back and refactor half your codebase.
Then came Tiago Cardoso's session on Building a Digital Team That Actually Works, which sparked a lot of thinking about how digital teams are structured today and what it really takes to make remote and distributed collaboration function well in a modern agency environment.
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My Session as an Extension Sponsor at Joomla World Conference 2026
One of the highlights of JWC2026 for me personally was presenting as an Official Extension Sponsor. I had the opportunity to talk about the extensions we have built at JoomConsultant, share some of the projects I have delivered for clients over the years, and connect with people in the community who are building on the same platform.
Standing in front of a room of Joomla professionals at the Joomla World Conference and sharing what we do was an experience I will not forget. It made everything that went into preparing for this trip feel completely worthwhile.
Day Two at JWC2026: Roadmap, Automation, and Commerce
Saturday at the Joomla World Conference 2026 packed in some of the most practical and forward looking sessions of the entire event.
Sigrid Gramlinger opened with an honest, inside look at the Joomla roadmap covering Joomla 6, 7, and 8 and where the platform is headed. What stood out was not just the roadmap itself but the transparency. This was not a polished marketing presentation. It was a real conversation about where things stand, what is being built, and what the community needs to do together to get there. Joomla 7 is in planning and expected in the coming year, with improvements across performance, security, and developer experience.
Ahmad Moussa's session on Joomla and Microsoft 365 was one that genuinely surprised me at JWC2026. Ahmad walked through how to connect Joomla with Microsoft Entra ID to manage users and permissions automatically across multiple Joomla sites. Instead of manually creating users on each site, everything flows from Microsoft 365 security groups. When a user is added or removed in Microsoft 365, their access across all connected Joomla sites updates automatically during Single Sign-On. For anyone managing Joomla at scale inside a corporate or institutional environment, this was a session worth its weight in gold.
Then came Pawel Frankowski's session on Mastering SP Page Builder 6, which covered power user workflows I had not fully explored. Dynamic content with custom fields, Flexbox controls for complex layouts, Lottie animation integration, built in AI content generators, accessibility improvements, and database level optimisations. If you use SP Page Builder on client sites, there is a lot more in version 6 than most people realise.
Olivier Buisard and Adam Melcher made a strong case for Joomla as a genuine ecommerce platform in their J2Commerce session. Multi-currency catalogs, subscriptions, B2B pricing, digital goods, all built natively inside Joomla without bolting on a third party system. Real merchants shared why they chose Joomla and J2Commerce over Shopify and WooCommerce, and what is coming next including AI powered storefront features.
Yannick Gaultier's session on SEO in an AI world addressed something that many Joomla site owners are thinking about right now. Should SEO still matter when people are searching through ChatGPT, Gemini, and other AI assistants instead of Google? The answer, as Yannick made clear at JWC2026, is yes. SEO is still the foundation because AI assistants themselves rely on search engines for up to date information. The session covered what to do specifically for AI optimisation on top of a solid SEO base.
People I Met at JWC2026
One of the most valuable parts of any conference is the conversations that happen between sessions, and JWC2026 was no different.
Meeting Brian Teeman in person was a moment I had thought about for years. As one of the co-founders of Joomla and the Joomla Influencer of the Year at the J!Awards 2026, he represents everything the platform stands for. Getting to have a conversation with him in Potsdam was something I will carry with me for a long time.
I also had a great conversation with Kawshar Ahmed, Founder and CEO of Ollyo, the company behind JoomShaper. We discussed the EasyStore payment plugin and I got some useful insights into the direction of SP Page Builder and JoomShaper templates. JoomShaper had a strong presence at JWC2026, and rightly so. Their work was recognised at the J!Awards with Favourite Website Design going to joomshaper.com and Favourite Template for Joomla going to Helix Ultimate.
It was also great to meet Elisa Foltyn, who spoke on the topic of open source and the people behind it. Her session, titled "It's all about the (YO)U", was a reminder that open source is not just about code. It is about the individuals who choose to give their time and knowledge to something bigger than themselves.
And meeting Sigrid Gramlinger in person, after following her work in the Joomla community, was a genuine pleasure. Her energy and commitment to the platform came through in everything she did at the conference.
J!Awards 2026: Celebrating the Best of Joomla
The Joomla Awards were announced at JWC2026 and celebrated the best across the community. Here are the winners:
- Favourite New Joomla 6 Feature: Automated Updates
- Favourite Community Magazine Article: "21 improvements that can make a difference to a website" by Louise Hawkins
- Favourite Website Design: joomshaper.com
- Joomla Influencer of the Year: Brian Teeman
- Favourite Extension for Joomla: Akeeba Backup for Joomla
- Favourite Template for Joomla: Helix Ultimate
- Favourite Hosting for Joomla: Hostinger
- Favourite Tool for Your Joomla Workflow: mySites.guru
- J!Volunteer of the Year: David Jardin
Community Contribution and the Closing of JWC2026
Saturday afternoon at the Joomla World Conference 2026 was dedicated to community contribution, and what struck me was how genuinely willing everyone was to give their time. This is a community that shows up not because they have to but because they care.
The closing session was led by Sigrid Gramlinger, and it brought everything together beautifully. JWC2026 ended with group photographs, laughter, and the kind of conversations that only happen when people who care about the same thing finally get to be in the same room.
What I Am Taking Back from Joomla World Conference 2026
Attending JWC2026 reminded me why I chose Joomla in 2014 and why I have never looked back. The platform is not standing still. The community is not standing still. There is real momentum here, and being in Potsdam showed me that the people building Joomla's future are passionate, capable, and deeply committed.
If you are running a Joomla site and have questions about upgrades, security, automation, or anything else that came up at the Joomla World Conference 2026, I am happy to have a conversation.