WordCamp US 2025 contributor day is coming to Portland, Oregon on Tuesday, August 26, starting at 9:00 am Pacific Time, and ending at 5:00 pm. There will be a table for Core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. AI during it and here is what to expect if you are curious about joining that table.
In order to join the team you don’t have to be a developer, although at this stage of the project knowing what you are going to do might help you navigate through the entire day.
Before you arrive
There is a focus right now on the AI Building Blocks, we recommend reading about them before the contribution day. Make sure you register for contributor day, have an account here on WordPress.org and have joined the Making WordPress Slack.
Pre Reads
Over the past few months, the Core AI team and contributors have been hard at work on several projects. We recommend reading and familiarizing yourself with some of the most relevant discussions, work and concepts for this.
- AI Building Blocks – A high-level overview on the strategy that Core AI has for the WordPress project.
- Project repos: PHP AI Client, Abilities API, MCP Adapter, AI Experiments
- Abilities API Overview (third party) – A great article by a Core AI contributor describing the Abilities API A core WordPress API (introduced in 6.9) that creates a central registry of capabilities, making WordPress functions discoverable and accessible to AI agents, automation tools, and developers. Transforms WordPress from isolated functions into a unified system. in great detail.
- MCP Documentation – Documentation for Model Context Protocol.
- MCP Adapter Translates WordPress abilities into Model Context Protocol format, allowing AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT to discover and invoke WordPress capabilities as tools, resources, and prompts. Github GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged by the repository owner. https://github.com/ Discussions – The most relevant one is a discussion on how this will be packaged and distributed.
- PHP PHP (recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely-used open source general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for web development and can be embedded into HTML. https://www.php.net/manual/en/index.php Client API An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways. Github Discussions – Several great discussions for the PHP client API building block Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience..
You should also skim the #core-ai Slack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/ channel. The WordPress Project Slack recently had AI features enabled, and using that for a overview is very helpful!
What to expect on the day
Contributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/ is a good opportunity to meet the core AI team and discuss any questions, ideas, or concepts you may have. We’d love as many questions as possible to take to our panel being presented on Thursday at 10:30 PT. While we expect to have some discussions, we’d like to stick to the specific goals outlined below during Contributor Day which are primarily oriented around furthering the AI building blocks, and use our panel time slot to publicly answer and discuss any persistent concepts that have surfaced since the formation of our team.
During the day you can get help from the table leads and Team Reps:
Other leads and contributors will also be at the table. We are there to build, meet, and further Core AI, so please don’t hesitate to come up to us, even if we look focused!
The schedule for Contributor Day is kept up to date on the WordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. US Website. As of 19 August it is as follows:
- 8:00 am – Registration opens
- 8:30 am – Doors Open – Mt Hood (Oregon Ballroom)
- 9:00 am – Start time / Opening Remarks
- 11:45 am – Group photo
- 12:00 pm – Lunch
- 1:30 pm – Teams resume
- 4:30 pm – Team summaries and wrap-up (within the team)
- 5:00 pm – Contributor Day ends
Our Goals for WCUS Contributor Day 2025
For Core AI, we have several specific goals that we’d like to achieve during the day:
- Contributing to the Building Blocks repos – each has its own goal for the day.
- Forming a concrete plan for the AI Experiments plugin WordPress's AI laboratory bringing all building blocks together. Serves as both a user tool and developer reference implementation. First release (v0.1.0) includes Title Generation experiment.. What we’re building, how we’re building it, and a roadmap for what’s next.
- Creating several proof of concepts, leveraging the building blocks to showcase how each comes together even in an early state.
- Improving contributor flows for the Core AI Team – Codifying a clear path towards contribution and implementing policies and systems to enable this. A big focus for this will be implementing and finalizing the early draft of the Handbook.
It’s important to note that this Contributor Day aims to operate like a hackathon. To those that have attended past contributor days this may feel slightly different than previous events. For Core AI, this is the perfect approach; using and experimenting with the building blocks in real time will help us better understand how they work in practice.
Async online
If you are not attending there will be opportunity to contribute online as well. Just join in when you can in Slack. Involved contributors like @justlevine will be online, and we’ll be checking Slack from Portland, Oregon as well.
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