My WordPress Contribution Journey: A Transparency Report
This is my WordPress contribution journey: two years that took me from my first WordCamp to Core Contributor badges, open-source plugins, and a health crisis that changed everything.
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If you are thinking about diving into WordPress contributions yourself, read this first.
How It Started
I have been blogging since 2019 and started using WordPress in early 2020, testing and learning with a couple of blogs on Hostinger hosting. After building more than ten beginner-friendly blogs and writing tutorials, I realized that running these sites sustainably meant learning monetization.
So, I started with tech affiliate content, moved into kitchen appliances, and eventually into WordPress products and hosting once I had enough experience to help other bloggers grow.
That work led me to launch EYNZone (formerly EYNWorld InfoBlog). My first site was rejected by Google AdSense more than twenty times before I studied the guidelines closely enough to get approval within a month, on a brand new domain with just two articles published.
That experience turned into an AdSense approval service for new bloggers and later into project referrals from friends.
Eventually, I decided to look for a full-time job, which took me through more than 800 brand applications and 2000 job applications, most of which were rejected.
During that search, I found the Underrepresented in Tech group through Michelle Frechette, which gave me access to Post Status, one of the most established communities for the business of WordPress. That is where I first started meeting WordPress community members and learning about the project itself.
My First WordCamp
I learned about WordCamp Bhopal 2023 through Kripesh Adwani, who was organizing the event with Yashwardhan Rana. I had already been working with several people in that circle, including Rajesh Chauhan and Nabin, through my website. I told them I would attend, even though I had no money to make it happen.
I asked for sponsorship in the Post Status Slack. For most businesses in that community, the amount I needed was small change, but a lot of people encouraged me, and Alan, Jenni, and Corey Maass stepped up financially.
Michelle and a few others shared my post on X, which brought in additional support from Ronald. Without that help, I would not have made it to my first WordCamp.
That trip did not go smoothly. I traveled at the last moment, ended up at the wrong location at night, and had a whole hotel saga before it was over. But it turned into a lifelong friendship with the community, and it marked the beginning of four events in a row: WordCamp Mumbai 2023, WordCamp Udaipur 2023 (where I was a scholarship recipient), and WordCamp Ahmedabad 2023.
Through these events, I met, in person, Yashwardhan, Satish, Rajesh, Prahlad, Ashish, Amit Singh, Abhishek Deshpande, Aditya Shah, Shoeb, Kuldeep, Kawaljeet, Pankaj Singh Kushwaha, Virendra, Priyesh, Aditya Vikram Singh, Nidhi Jain, Chaya Oosterbroek, Taco Verdonschot, Ajit Bohra, Hardeep Asrani, Hitanshu Sahu, Vishal Mukadam, Lokesh, Prathamesh Palve, Arun Shenoy, Ritu Priya, Shweta Yadav, Nikita, Priya, Makarand Mane, and Nabin Jaiswal.
That is where I got interested in contributing directly, starting with the Marketing team and later expanding into Community, Meetups, Polyglots, Photos, Training, Core, and Plugins.
The Goal I Set for Myself
In January 2024, I published a public contribution goal for the year:
- Contribute 100 photos
- Translate 5000 strings
- Write 5 documentation pieces
- Organize meetups
- Attend 8 or more WordCamps
- Make meaningful marketing contributions
- Volunteer at 2 WordCamps
The response from the community was immediate. Matt said he would review my progress and offered to help me hit these goals. Steve got motivated and pledged 100 photos of his own. Pooja and Yashwardhan offered support whenever I needed it. Hardeep and Aditya, on the other hand, told me it was okay to feel burned out and that I should slow down, since this is a long game.
At the time, I only held the Photo Contributor badge, though I had already started actively contributing to Marketing and Training.
Year One: Hitting the Goals Early
I contributed 35 photos in the first month and became a Photo Moderator, moderating over 180 photos and suggesting more than 400 strings.
I volunteered at the WordPress Kerala Photo Festival 2024, got accepted to volunteer at WCEU 2024, and contributed to the WordPress Photo Festival amplification, Month in WordPress – Jan 2024, and WordPress 6.5 beta 1.
I was also selected as a mentee in the WordPress Contributor Mentorship Program 2nd Cohort for Support and Polyglots in my very first month.
The following month, I added 11 more photos and around 185 strings. A new meetup group in Fatehpur was added to the chapter and kept contributing across teams. I also started scaling back slightly that month due to financial constraints.
By April, I had contributed 80 more photos, bringing the total to 122 and hitting my 100-photo goal in three months. I had suggested, translated, or reviewed 450 strings, contributed to WordPress 6.5, earned props and the Core Contributor badge, and graduated from the Contributor Mentorship Program.
I became a PTE for several projects, including the hi_IN locale for WordPress 6.5.x.
That was the only period I tracked and published monthly. I stopped publishing updates after that.
Over the rest of the year, I contributed 150 photos in total, moderated over 200, and translated, reviewed, or suggested around 1400 strings.
I did not write a formal documentation piece for the Training team, but I reviewed lesson videos and created more than five featured thumbnails for the lesson, which earned me the Training Contributions badge.
I organized my first meetup in May, for WordPress’s 21st birthday, and wrote the Monthly Meetup Organizer Newsletter for February, March, April, and May.
Within that year, I attended WordPress Kerala Photo Festival 2024 (online), WordCamp Bengaluru 2024, do_Action Bhopal 2024, WordCamp Nagpur 2024, WordCamp Kerala 2024, WordCamp Delhi 2024, WordCamp Ahmedabad 2025, and WordCamp Kolhapur 2025.
I also volunteered at PHPCamp 2024, an unconference inspired by BarCamp, which felt like an honor since PHP is the backbone of WordPress. I also attended several meetups between Varanasi and Kanpur.
I made contributions to marketing across most of these events and to WordPress 6.5’s beta, RC, and core releases. I was also an early contributor to Media Corps, a project reviewing media outlets, which the project leadership later closed.
Beyond the original goal, I led the Contributor Day table at WordCamp Delhi 2024 and WordCamp Kolhapur 2025, and was promoted from Content and Social Media Manager to Project Manager at do_Action Bhopal 2024, a charity hackathon.
Year Two: New Projects, New Roles
I attended WordCamp Pune 2025 and volunteered as a marketing team lead alongside Emma Young at WordCamp Asia 2025 in Manila.
Midway through the year, with help from Harish, Bhargav, Makarand, and Hitanshu Sahu, I built and published two open-source plugins:
- QuoteFrameShare, for creating and sharing customizable blockquotes in WordPress, built for content creators, poets, and storytellers.
- Contributor Photo Gallery, which displays and shares your WordPress.org photo contributions, is built for photographers and community members who want a portfolio without writing code.
Later that year, I attended WordCamp Bhopal 2025 and co-organized WordCamp Kolhapur 2026 as a Sponsor Wrangler.
The Support That Made This Possible
I want to be clear that a lot of what I achieved happened because the community showed up for me. People I had never met in person contributed money so I could attend my first WordCamp.
While I worked as a Marketing Coordinator at Barn2, Katie sponsored a couple of my WordCamp trips through the company’s events budget. That happened (the job) after Yashwardhan Rana spoke well of me to her, and I am grateful to him for that.
Florian, my current employer, gave me the time and flexibility to recover during a serious health crisis, at a point when many companies would have simply let me go.
I also want to share two more moments that meant a lot to me. Makarand nominated me for the Yoast Care Fund, and I was selected as a recipient, which was a genuine relief during a period when I needed it most. I am grateful to him for thinking of me and to the Yoast team for running a fund that actually reaches contributors who need it.
I also want to thank WP Open Community Collective for the Contributor Day Lead Sponsorship, sponsored by GoDaddy. That kind of backing for contributor leads is exactly the sort of structural support that keeps people like me able to show up and lead tables at events instead of dropping out because of the cost of it.
That kind of support is real, and I do not want the rest of this post to overshadow it.
The Other Side
Once I started this goal, I stopped thinking about the job that fed my family and paid too little attention to my health. I put nearly all my time into the community, and it caught up with me within a few months.
I burned out, my finances suffered, and no company I approached was willing to support the work I was doing, even in a simple arrangement where a company sponsors some contribution hours in exchange for the visibility that comes with it.
Things got worse after I publicly thanked Matt for sponsoring my selection to volunteer at WCEU 2024. I was unable to attend that event because of visa issues, and when I later used some of the remaining sponsorship funds to attend other events, I heard through the same community that people were calling me a beggar. That is a harsh word, and even when people use softer language, that is what they meant. Nobody took the time to understand the situation before saying it.
I noticed a pattern in how this got applied. A well-established contributor receiving a scholarship rarely raises an eyebrow, but a financially struggling contributor getting the same kind of support becomes a talking point, even when the support was based on real contributions.
Part of this, I believe, came from being new and being helped early on by someone as visible as Matt. I also ran into a seniority problem in parts of the community, especially in India, where some people behave more like politicians protecting territory than contributors welcoming new people.
It is not just an Indian community issue either. The more I looked into it, the more it seemed to be a pattern everywhere.
On the hi_IN locale specifically, I submitted requests that went unanswered for over two weeks, when they should have been handled by the Locale Manager or GTE. My PTE requests were approved by the Global Polyglots Team, Tobi, without issue.
But after suggesting, reviewing, or translating more than 1400 strings, when I asked to become a GTE, I received a quick response declining the request, with the explanation that I should focus on improving my translation accuracy in the PTE role I already had before taking on GTE responsibilities.
It felt like nobody wanted to invest time in that team, and nobody wanted to bring in someone who was ready to regularly contribute. I do not know if the Polyglots team reps are actively reviewing this locale or its Locale Managers and GTEs.
Despite contributing across more than eight teams and understanding how most of them operate, my requests to help with WordPress release coordination were consistently declined. I understand that a lot of people self-nominate for these roles, but it would have been reasonable to consider someone who had already written/helped with Month in WordPress updates, monthly meetup newsletters, and release announcement posts.
When I offered to volunteer at a WordCamp by reaching out directly to the organizing team, I was told they were only selecting volunteers from the local city. I later learned there were only three or four volunteers total, and some of them were the organizers’ own family members.
It is hard not to read that as a preference for keeping things within a closed circle rather than growing the community with real contributors.
There is one experience I have kept mostly private until now. At WordCamp Bengaluru 2024, I was asked to photograph the WCAsia 2025 organizers together and was told I would be credited. The photo went up without any credit, which is a code of conduct issue once credit has been promised.
The same person I later volunteered under also dismissed a health concern I raised, comparing it to what she said women experience during their period, without acknowledging that my concern was valid on its own terms.
Even while unwell, I worked the full event and led the volunteer table on the first day. I am vegetarian and allergic to rice, so I went without a full meal while running the event, which left me in worse shape by the end.
After all of that, when I approached companies about sponsoring some of my hours in exchange for contributing back to WordPress, I was told my contributions were not enough.
I stayed hopeful about Matt’s earlier offer to review my contribution goals and help me plan the next year. When that conversation happened, the answer was just no; it came with a suggestion to look at other people instead, which was harder to hear than a plain no would have been.
After returning from WCAsia 2025, I had a health emergency, thankfully at my aunt’s home rather than while traveling. Once I got home, it happened again, and I was diagnosed with typhoid and told to rest for 45 days. Even during that recovery, I built and published another open-source plugin.
A month later, I was in a bike accident, which I believe was connected to the same underlying health issues from insufficient nutrition and pushing through work while unwell. Since then, I have been dealing with seizures. I had planned to talk about this earlier, but a few community friends asked me to hold off until WordCamp Asia 2026, hosted in India, was safely over.
Eventually, I decided to step back and asked the Photo, Polyglots, and Community teams to revoke my access, since I did not feel right holding access I could not actively use.
When I felt ready to contribute again, I found that the door had mostly closed. I was told my past contributions were no longer considered sufficient, despite meeting the same bar that had qualified me before.
I was also told by the Community Team that I could not receive the Community Contributor badge because it is reserved for Event Supporters. That is only part of the guideline. The same guideline also allows the badge for people who provide valuable contributions to the Community team more broadly, which includes the newsletters, meeting attendance, and ideas I contributed. The team, run by A8C at the time, declined anyway.
I raised a proposal with Automattic and Community leadership to explore a structured way for someone, myself or otherwise, to help grow both the community and the project’s usage. It was turned down as not a current priority. I understand the proposal was not perfect, but I would have appreciated a conversation about refining it together rather than a flat no. I plan to publish that proposal separately and would welcome feedback from anyone reading this.
Even after all of this, when I applied to share my contribution story at WordCamp Asia 2026, it was rejected by the same organizing team. When I applied to organize WordCamp Asia 2027, thinking a Malaysia-based event might bring a more neutral selection process, I was rejected again.
This came right after that same team published an article stating that more than half of their organizers were first-time WordCamp Asia organizers, while still not considering someone with a documented contribution history. The pattern I keep seeing is that team leads choose people they already know, who then choose people they already know.
I think part of what happened here is that some people do not want to see a new contributor build a public profile strong enough to attract sponsorship. In my case specifically, I think some of it came down to growing visibility in a short period of time, which some people did not take well.
What I Learned
The community is genuinely welcoming and has supported me in ways I am grateful for. Because of that support, I have met people who became close friends, mentors, and something close to family. I would still encourage anyone to attend WordCamps and contribute in whatever way fits their life.
My honest advice: if contributing is not paying your bills, give it an hour or two a week and protect the rest of your time for the work that does. Do not contribute beyond your capacity, especially before you have covered the basics for yourself and the people who depend on you.
The community could be more welcoming toward new contributors if it acted with more consistency and openness. Polyglots reps should regularly check in on Locale Managers and GTEs, and if a locale is inactive or barely active, the people holding those roles should be reassessed and replaced based on actual contribution and availability, not tenure.
The community team and other teams need to know their own guidelines clearly and review badge applications with proper attention, not on autopilot. I know this sounds harsh, and I know most people doing this are volunteers giving their time freely, which I genuinely appreciate. But transparency in this process is not optional. If someone cannot commit to that, they should not be taking on a team/rep role.
In flagship event organizing, I know the Community Team is involved, but I would like to see them compare applicant eligibility directly rather than leaving the decision entirely to local leads. That is a basic step toward making the process feel fair.
I would also like to suggest that scholarships at flagship events be awarded based on contributions or genuine financial need. Right now, we sometimes see winners selected who have not contributed meaningfully, or who are already financially comfortable and do not need the support.
If you take one thing from this, do not pour yourself entirely into any community. Do it at a pace you can sustain, because without that boundary, it can start to feel hollow and political instead of rewarding.
Bottom Line
If you only remember a few things from this post, remember these:
- Contribute at a pace your life can actually support. Set a limit before you start, not after you burn out.
- Financial support and scholarships should be judged by contribution and need, not by who is already well known or well connected.
- Guidelines exist so they can be followed consistently. If a team cannot apply its own rules transparently, that is worth calling out, whether the people involved are volunteers or paid staff.
- Being new to a community does not mean your work counts for less. If you are doing the work, ask for what you have earned.
- Your health comes before any badge, event, or goal. No contribution is worth ignoring your body’s warning signs.
I’m Open to New Opportunities
If you are a Product, SaaS, Agency, or Hosting company looking for someone who understands both the WordPress ecosystem and the people in it, I would love to talk. I bring years of experience across partnerships, creator and affiliate outreach, community building, and content strategy, including two-plus years of hands-on contribution work inside WordPress itself. If that sounds useful to your team, reach out to me at ask[at]satyamvishwakarma[dot]com or connect with me on LinkedIn.
