CMS Conf

26/08/2026

It was supposed to be an easy launch... until it turned into a two-year migration journey. 🔄

What starts as a seemingly straightforward transition—moving users from a legacy editor to a modern one—can quickly evolve into a complex product and engineering challenge. At CMS Conf, we love looking at the reality behind "simple" infrastructure shifts, especially when a platform as mission-critical as the Zendesk Knowledge editor is involved.

In our upcoming session, ‘It was supposed to be an easy launch’, Pati Walencik (Senior Product Manager at Zendesk) will deliver a candid post-mortem of a two-year migration. This talk—conducted in English—strips away polished product marketing to reveal the trade-offs, internal alignment hurdles, and operational realities of shipping a massive migration at scale.

Key discussion points:

The Migration Trap: Why "Early Access" programs can provide a false sense of security and why they often fail to de-risk a full-scale public release.

Engineering vs. Reality: How to balance technical ex*****on with the heavy lifting of product and operational changes during a multi-year rollout.

Communication as Architecture: Aligning internal stakeholders and external users through a long-term transition—and what happens when communication breaks down.

AI vs. Product Strategy: A critical look at why AI is not a "universal solution" for complex platform challenges and when traditional product management rigor remains the only path forward.

Lessons for Lifecycle Management: Real-world decisions, mistakes, and trade-offs that every product manager should study before initiating their next major infrastructure migration.

This session is essential for product managers, engineering leads, and stakeholders managing the lifecycle of complex digital products who need to understand the "hidden costs" of platform evolution.

About the speaker:

Pati Walencik (Senior Product Manager, Zendesk) is a veteran product leader with over a decade of experience shaping digital products for global brands. At Zendesk, she focuses on customer experience, specifically the lifecycle of knowledge creation and delivery. An active mentor and educator, Pati brings a focus on pragmatic, evidence-based decision-making to modern product development.

Do not miss the opportunity to learn from these hard-won lessons.

⚓Secure your place at the conference:
Purchase your tickets here: https://cmsconf.com/buy-a-ticket/

CMS Conf – Architecture over tooling. Navigating complexity.

24/08/2026

Is AI just a 'sidebar plugin', or a core architectural primitive? 🤖

The definition of a CMS is rapidly evolving from a static repository into an intelligent, agent-ready backend. At CMS Conf, we are examining what it means for a platform to be truly "AI-native"—built to be queried, extended, and operated by agents rather than just human editors.

In our upcoming session, ‘Payload as an AI-native CMS’, Paul Popus (Senior Engineer) will explore the technical infrastructure behind building agentic workflows directly into your content backend.

This talk will be conducted in English, offering a practical deep dive into how modern frameworks like Payload leverage code-first configuration, MCP (Model Context Protocol), and vector embeddings to bridge the gap between structured data and intelligent application behaviour.

Designed for engineers and architects who want to build durable, agent-ready systems for the AI era.

Secure your place at the conference:
Purchase your tickets here: https://cmsconf.com/buy-a-ticket/

CMS Conf – Architecture over tooling. Navigating complexity.

22/08/2026

PPNT is the perfect spacious and modern venue for CMS Conf. But Gdynia itself? That’s where the real adventure begins.

This city has so much to offer: culture, innovation, the sea, and plenty of unique places to discover beyond the conference venue.

Follow us to discover our side events. We’ll take you beyond the conference rooms and show you a taste of this vibrant city, full of culture, innovation and energy.

See you in Gdynia! 🌊



CMS Conference Gdynia

21/08/2026

Is technical support just 'peripheral work'? Absolutely not. 🚀

In the world of CMS, we often focus intensely on the initial development phase, yet overlook what happens afterwards. In reality, the maintenance and support phase is the true test of architectural knowledge and technical precision.

At the upcoming CMS Conf, we are going to examine this topic with complete transparency.

We invite you to attend the session ‘Support: Expectations vs. Reality’, delivered by Maciej Kuchnik (Head of WLC Growth & Care at White Label Coders).

In this presentation—which will be conducted in Polish—Maciej will challenge the misconception that support is a secondary task. Instead, he will demonstrate why it represents one of the most demanding environments for any developer.

Key discussion points:

Why maintenance and support demand a deeper technical baseline than many greenfield projects.

The realities of debugging third-party code in live production environments under strict time and performance constraints.

Identifying the intersection of technical debt and architectural failure during incident resolution.

Managing the complex communication requirements that are essential for successful long-term project stewardship.

This session offers a pragmatic, transparent view of the engineering rigour required to manage production systems effectively, providing essential takeaways for developers and project managers alike.

About the speaker:

Maciej Kuchnik (Head of WLC Growth & Care, White Label Coders) leads the division responsible for the development and long-term maintenance of complex WordPress projects. As a developer, author, and community contributor, Maciej brings a data-driven perspective to the challenges of sustaining scalable CMS platforms.

Do not miss the opportunity to gain these insights.

Secure your place at the conference:
Purchase your tickets here: https://cmsconf.com/buy-a-ticket/

CMS Conf – Architecture over tooling. Navigating complexity.

20/08/2026

Do you really need a magic wand to automate your business with AI?

In episode 16 of the CMS Conf Podcast, Damian Ślimak, automation and SEO expert at Nawigator.ai, explains why rolling out AI at a company is more of a human challenge than a technical one.

Damian, who's spent 20 years automating online stores, explains why learning AI is a lot like learning to drive - terrifying at first, second nature a few weeks in. He also gets candid about what employees actually fear when a company rolls out automation, and why e-commerce clients couldn't care less whether something is "AI" - they only care about the result.

✔️ https://open.spotify.com/episode/1dGEdLo1tUxQl8syXT0QEp?si=YazfYl0aSBKWqQWSrKniIw

✔️https://cmsconf.slack.com/archives/C09T09EL2E8/p1785424973129419

✔️https://youtu.be/pMLB6wh-sEI

19/08/2026

A photograph enters a content system as a file. It leaves as a set of renditions, metadata, usage rights and delivery decisions.
On World Photography Day, it's worth remembering that media handling is an architectural question: where assets live, how they're transformed, and what the system guarantees at scale. Different CMSs answer it differently — which is precisely what we compare at CMS Conf.

⚓20% off tickets for CMS Conf 2026 (12–14 November, Gdynia)

Code: SPECIAL-CMSCONF2026�https://cmsconf.com/buy-a-ticket/

18/08/2026

What actually turns a website visitor into a paying customer?
In episode 17 of the CMS Conf Podcast, Katarzyna Janoska, UI Developer, UX Designer, and WordPress Unicorn at Anoriell, breaks down what makes small business websites convert.

Katarzyna and Ania dig into why "the website is too slow" is rarely the real problem, what a "graveyard website" - no social proof, no recent activity, no working contact form - signals to visitors, and why business owners obsess over the perfect domain name instead of the messaging that actually sells. Spoiler: it all comes down to one word - reassurance.

▪https://open.spotify.com/episode/4lo5IhcpCY3Cl2eh5XFjgS?si=5f0d7216b5a54f2c

▪https://open.spotify.com/episode/4lo5IhcpCY3Cl2eh5XFjgS?si=5f0d7216b5a54f2c

▪https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKsXabyBlUw

What actually turns a website visitor into a paying customer?In e...

07/08/2026

For over a decade, the CMS industry has remained fixated on a single output: the website. Meanwhile, modern enterprises have quietly built a "parallel content universe"—webinar archives, internal knowledge-sharing, support transcripts, and sales data—that remains trapped in silos. While AI has drastically reduced the cost of repurposing this knowledge, most organizations lack the infrastructure to actually orchestrate it.

In our upcoming session, ‘Beyond Publishing: Why You Must Rethink What "CMS" Even Means’, Paweł Zmysłowski (CEO of White Label Coders) argues that the era of the "publishing-only" CMS is coming to an end. This talk explores the shift from content management as a static repository to content management as the operational backbone for enterprise knowledge capture, contextualization, and deployment.

Key discussion points:

The Content Bottleneck: Why the challenge for modern enterprises is no longer content creation, but the effective orchestration of the knowledge they already produce.

The Parallel Universe Audit: Identifying the hidden knowledge silos within your organization—from support tickets to internal sessions—and why they are currently failing to feed your sales enablement or AI systems.

Economic Inversion: How AI has shifted the economics of content, allowing a single expert session to be transformed into articles, training modules, and chatbot datasets without loss of quality.

The "Legacy" Threshold: A practical framework for assessing your current stack and determining if your CMS is ready to act as a knowledge-deployment engine, or if it is destined to become a legacy bottleneck.

This session provides a crucial strategic lens for CTOs and CMOs, helping them define whether their current CMS is an asset for knowledge-driven growth or an architectural barrier.

Speaker:

Paweł Zmysłowski (CEO, White Label Coders) – With 14 years of experience building enterprise-grade content platforms, Paweł leads one of Europe’s most significant WordPress engineering teams. Having started as a developer and platform architect, he now specializes in helping iGaming, e-commerce, and enterprise media clients navigate the shift toward AI-native content operations.

Secure your place at the conference:

https://cmsconf.com/buy-a-ticket/

CMS Conf – Architecture over tooling. Navigating complexity.

06/08/2026

Is your WordPress site creating more URLs than you actually need?

WordPress makes it incredibly easy to generate tag archives, category pages, author archives, pagination and, in WooCommerce, countless combinations of filters and product attributes.

The problem? Not every URL deserves to be indexed.

In the latest CMS Conf Podcast, Kacper Krasnodębski Vilaro explains why WordPress SEO is often a structural problem — and how unmanaged taxonomies and archives can lead to URL bloat, diluted SEO signals and wasted crawl activity.

The key question isn’t just: “What content do we have?”

It’s: “What has the CMS built around that content — and does any of it belong in search?”

🎙️ Watch the latest CMS Conf Podcast on YouTube: https://youtube.com/?si=S5rplHDBPy58MFXl

Want to dive deeper into CMS architecture, SEO and the future of the web?

🎟️ Join us at CMS Conf 2026 in Gdynia: https://cmsconf.com/buy-a-ticket/

05/08/2026

In the wake of the European Accessibility Act (EAA), web accessibility has transitioned from a frontend "nice-to-have" to a non-negotiable architectural requirement. At CMS Conf, we argue that the choice of CMS is the most critical factor in achieving sustainable compliance. An inaccessible backend—or one that lacks structural guardrails—forces teams into a perpetual struggle against their own technology, whereas an accessibility-first CMS empowers users to maintain high standards effortlessly.

In our upcoming session, ‘The CMS A11y Matrix’, Piotr Mońka (Tech Lead at ambiscale) will provide a comparative analysis of today’s leading CMS architectures. We will look beyond marketing promises to evaluate the practical accessibility potential of monoliths, SaaS builders, and Headless systems, culminating in a robust decision-making framework for architects and project managers.

Key discussion points:

Architectural Guardrails: Analyzing the trade-offs between the total creative freedom of Headless systems and the built-in accessibility safeguards of traditional platforms.

Compliance Economics: How to estimate the integration effort required to achieve WCAG 2.2 AA standards across different CMS engines.

The CMS A11y Matrix: Introducing an actionable framework to align platform selection with project budget, team efficiency, and long-term inclusion goals.

Operational Inclusion: Moving accessibility from an afterthought to a core architectural strategy that streamlines daily content production.

This session provides a data-driven roadmap for teams who want to build high-performance, compliant, and truly inclusive digital products by choosing the right engine from the start.

Speaker:

Piotr Mońka (Tech Lead, Ambiscale) – responsible for guiding technical teams in the delivery and lifecycle management of high-quality web projects. With a focus on performance, security, and accessibility, Piotr specializes in implementing modern engineering standards that bridge the gap between technical requirements and inclusive design.

Secure your place at the conference:

https://cmsconf.com/buy-a-ticket/

CMS Conf – Architecture over tooling. Navigating complexity.