A few weeks ago I got a few short minutes to talk to my colleagues about getting involved in the WordPress community. We usually talk about product and all that good stuff, and that matters. But at the end of the day, the community is the thing underneath all of it.
WordPress runs a big slice of the internet. That is all software. But it is also people. It can’t happen without people. Someone translates strings so WordPress can be used in their country. Someone taught a room of kids how to build an app with it. Someone went to a coworking session in their town and learned how to publish their first post. Someone started a club at their university so students could learn to build in the open. Someone coded a plugin with Claude to add the one feature their site really needed.
That said, a lot can be done with AI now. I built a database for a talent organization I love so they could keep better track of the vendors and tools they rely on. I used Claude and it was genuinely cool. That database took me a weekend instead of months. What Claude couldn’t supply was caring about the org in the first place. Matt said the other day that AI is going to take over the drudgery, and what is left is the stuff that is actually fun. A bot can’t host a meetup or a WordCamp, he said. It can help you organize one, keep track of the details, plan it more efficiently. It might help you contribute better, but you still have to be the one who shows up at contributor day. It is not going to get excited about a weird problem, or come up with the weird problem in the first place. More people are going to build more things faster now, and plenty of them will land in WordPress without knowing there is a community attached to it. Meetups are how they find out.
At work we have been reading Getting Real, the Basecamp book. It is mostly about software, but really it is about building something real. And a meetup of people talking about WordPress is the most real thing in the whole ecosystem, outside of the actual software people build. And that is people too.
I just came back from WordCamp US 2026 in Phoenix. What a delight to be around people in person, just being people together, celebrating and building the software, making human connections, evangelizing the community.
Which brings me to you. If you have ever gotten anything out of WordPress, and most of the web has, there is probably a meetup near you (and if there isn’t, you should start one). It might be small. It might be a little awkward the first time. Go anyway. Show up once. That is how every one of these rooms started, with one more person deciding to walk in.
Find your local group. Show up. It needs you!
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