StripeCon Europe 2026: A year of insight, innovation, and community
StripeCon Europe 2026 has wrapped up, and what an energising, idea‑packed event it was. Every year the Silverstripe community comes together to share knowledge, challenge assumptions, and push the boundaries of what we can build. But this year’s conference genuinely felt like a leap forward. The presentations were sharp, deeply practical, and refreshingly honest about the challenges and opportunities ahead for developers, agencies, and organisations using Silverstripe.
From discussions on emerging tooling and AI use to case studies showcasing clever problem‑solving, the speaker lineup delivered a strong mix of technical depth and real‑world experience. It was one of those years where you walk away with a notebook full of ideas and a renewed appreciation for the community that keeps this ecosystem thriving.
Sharing my talk: Website performance with Silverstripe
I was excited to contribute to the program with my talk on website performance in Silverstripe, exploring how to improve loading, optimise rendering pipelines, and make the most of caching strategies.
Performance optimisation is a huge field, and my goal was to distil the parts I find most important into something practical and immediately useful. There’s always more to explore, of course, but I hope the talk highlighted a few ideas, patterns, and techniques that can make a real difference. As I mentioned during the session, performance work is never a single switch you flip. It’s a series of compromises, trade‑offs, and iterative steps that gradually shape a faster, more resilient site.
Presenting via streaming meant I wasn’t physically in the room, but it was still fantastic to be part of the event and to share approaches that developers can apply straight away in their own projects.
You can find the slides of my talk here and watch it here.
Talks that stood out
This year’s program was packed with gems, but a few talks really stuck with me.
Manuel Matuzovic’s “19½ Things You Didn’t Know about Accessibility in HTML and CSS” was a standout. Full of practical insights, small but important details, and reminders of how much small improvements can matter. And Matic Bončina’s “When AI comes crawling: How to keep digital spiders under control?” was both timely and uniting, offering a grounded look at how AI‑driven crawling affects our sites and what we can or can't do about it. Tim Burt’s session on “Connecting Silverstripe CMS with Astro” highlighted a compelling approach to high‑performance delivery: using Astro to generate a fully static site that can be served from a CDN, keeping Silverstripe and PHP completely out of the public-facing stack.
I also loved all the lightning talks about new modules. The rapid‑fire format always brings great energy, and this year delivered some genuinely exciting updates. Tim Burt’s "Silverstripe Schema module" talk was a highlight, showing a new take on what we built in our innoweb/silverstripe-social-metadata module; Johannes Hammersen's "Keep your backends out of reach" showed how to use Cloudflare access control to keep the Silverstripe admin secure, and James Cocker’s “Post‑Upgrade Smoke Testing for Silverstripe” demonstrated a clever, practical solution to reviewing page types after a Silverstripe upgrade.
Thanks to all the speakers!
Streaming done right
I would also like to thank the organisers from S2-Hub for delivering an excellent livestream this year; it really deserves a special mention. The free YouTube stream was smooth, reliable, and high‑quality. Thank you.
Looking ahead
StripeCon Europe 2026 reminded me once again why this community is so special: the generosity, the curiosity, the willingness to share and collaborate. I’m already looking forward to next year: to new talks, new faces, and hopefully new ways for even more people to join in.
And if you couldn’t make it this time, don’t worry. You can rewatch the streams at: https://www.youtube.com/@stripecon/streams