This week’s AI contributor meeting focused on a retrospective of the team’s 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 presence — 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://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/ and the “prompt bar” booth — alongside updates on AI Plugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party. development, a Secrets 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. proposal for WordPress 7.2, a new documentation-translation pilot from Polyglots, and a discussion on standardizing how AI connectors advertise their capabilities.
WordCamp US Retrospective: Contributor Day and Prompt Bar
Contributor Day format: @jason_the_adams reported that Contributor Day shifted to a hackathon format — 30-second pitches at a mic, followed by table-based work and closing one-minute readouts. Despite the late change, the team felt the format sharpened focus and collaboration. Of four AI-table projects, three (WPBench performance work, a vector search proof-of-concept, and the 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. plugin) progressed well with light guidance; the AI Contribution Guidelines project needed heavier facilitation and produced only an outline after about an hour and a half of dedicated work late in the day. The team’s main takeaway: open-ended projects need a dedicated facilitator lined up in advance, or should be scoped for easier independent validation.
Booth branding and layout: @jason_the_adams and @nikskyverge noted that attendees frequently mistook the booth for a vendor table — partly from proximity to a commercial sponsor with a similar setup, and partly because the branding read as WordCamp-branded rather than clearly WordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org//volunteer-driven. For future events, the team recommends a more conversational layout (small round tables and seating rather than a staffed booth) and clearer .org branding. Paul Bearne suggested proposing a shared “core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. team corner” to WordCamp organizers, where multiple core teams could sit together — noting Gutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc.
https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/ has done something similar in the past.
Other feedback: The team lacked a simple starter resource for attendees completely new to AI in WordPress, and real-time feedback capture (form, spreadsheet) was harder in practice than expected. Several attendees didn’t realize AI features ship via a separate plugin rather than WordPress core.
Post-conference write-up: The team agreed a formal post-mortem is worth publishing. @nikskyverge will follow up with @justlevine, who had already started a draft, and will write one up if needed.
AI Plugin and 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 AI Client Development
@dkotter confirmed AI Plugin 1.3.0 shipped last week and development has moved to 1.4.0. Separately, PHP AI Client embeddings work did not land in WordPress 7.1. With 7.2 beta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. 1 targeted for around October 20th, the team wants PHP AI Client changes — embeddings in particular — merged well ahead of that deadline to leave time for upstream review. @neel33 will share the 7.2 timeline with @jason_the_adams to help prioritize what can land in time.
Secrets API Proposal for WordPress 7.2
@whyisjake shared a proposal to merge the Secrets API — already available in the AI plugin — into WordPress 7.2 core, and is seeking community feedback on the published post. @pbearne asked that documentation include a straightforward way for plugins to detect availability of the feature so existing plaintext-secret code can be migrated cleanly; Jake confirmed an interface exists for this and will make sure it’s documented.
Decision: The team aligned on moving forward with the Secrets API proposal for inclusion in WordPress 7.2 core.
Documentation Translation Pilot (Polyglots)
@estelaris outlined a pilot to use the AI plugin’s translation experiment to translate WordPress.org blog documentation into Spanish, starting with a small batch of articles on a mirrored Spanish (Rosetta) site. The goal is to establish a workflow for the Polyglots translation team covering AI translation, human revision, and approval. Discussion surfaced several current gaps:
- Translation is currently limited to paragraphs and headings — lists, tables, and other content types aren’t yet supported.
- There’s no built-in glossary mechanism, which Polyglots need to keep AI translations consistent with established WordPress terminology per language.
- Supported languages are controlled by a filter Filters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output. with no fixed list; adding a standard language is straightforward, but coverage still depends on what the underlying AI provider An AI service offering models for generation, embeddings, or other capabilities (e.g., Anthropic, Google, OpenAI). supports.
@dkotter encouraged @estelaris to open well-documented issues on the AI plugin repository for each gap, noting that clear issues there tend to attract contributor PRs quickly. @estelaris will also work with the Meta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. team to get the translation plugin enabled on the Spanish Rosetta site infrastructure.
Standardizing AI Capability Discovery for Connectors
Prompted by a question about text-to-speech support, @pbearne and @nikskyverge raised a recurring issue: users typically only discover that a connector doesn’t support a given capability (e.g., audio generation) after hitting an error, rather than up front. @dkotter noted the connectors screen already surfaces supported capabilities per provider, and that the PHP AI Client is built around providers declaring their own capabilities — but this isn’t yet exposed in a way that helps users choose a connector proactively, and third-party connector plugins add a plugin-discovery dimension the core screen doesn’t solve. The group saw an opportunity to standardize capability advertising (e.g., in plugin repo descriptions) so users could search or filter connectors by supported feature, but did not land on a concrete next step.
Decisions
Aligned
- Secrets API inclusion in WordPress 7.2 core: The team supports moving the Secrets API proposal forward for merge into WordPress 7.2.
Next Steps
- @jason_the_adams will distribute the Contributor Day AI Guidelines outline to the team for review ahead of drafting a full V1.
- @nikskyverge will share WordCamp US prompt bar feedback with the wider team and coordinate with David Lavine on the post-conference write-up.
- @neel33 will relay an outstanding 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/ question to @jason_the_adams and share the WordPress 7.2 release timeline to inform PHP AI Client prioritization.
- @estelaris will test the AI translation experiment on a personal site, open documented issues on the AI plugin repo for list/table translation and glossary support, and work with the Meta team on enabling translation for the Spanish Rosetta site.
Upcoming Meetings
Props to @jeffpaul for pre-publish review.
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