How AI and Automation Spotlight the Best of WordPress

A community is the strongest asset of any open sourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. project. For WordPress, that community is millions of people spread across every continent, building sites, writing tutorials, teaching workshops, answering support questions, and gathering at meetups and WordCamps. When they share what they’ve built or what they’ve learned, they are doing something no centralized marketing effort could replicate: telling highly individualized, authentic stories en masse.

In the past, surfacing these stories was difficult. There was a massive chasm between the act of creating something and sharing it with a global audience. A developer would build a feature, and then a separate chain of people would need to understand it, write about it, review it, format it, and distribute it across multiple platforms. A site owner would submit their work to the Showcase, and a team of contributors would need to moderate, write copy, produce screenshots, and publish it. Each handoff took time, and the further the final product traveled from the person who made it, the further any crafted narrative would drift.

Over the past couple years, a growing set of AI-powered workflows has been closing that gap, handling the procedural work that used to sit between a creation and its audience.

Social Media

The WordPress project maintains an official presence across 11 social media platforms (X, Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, and Tumblr). The vast majority of content posted through these channels is the sharing, remixing, and amplifying of work by people within the project, such as event announcements, release news, Showcase entries, and community achievements.

Each platform has its own audience expectations, content formats, and norms. In recent years, we’ve built a series of automated workflows (hat tip to Zapier) to collect content from dozens of sources and AI prompts to generate unique drafts that respect each platform’s conventions. The resulting amplification requests are tracked in the Marketing GitHub repository. The result is that when someone in the WordPress community ships a release, publishes a Showcase entry, or organizes an event, their work reaches 2.4 million followers across platforms without significant delay. Recently, our confidence in these workflows has grown to the point that some content, such as releases, is auto-posted immediately.

WPTV to YouTube

WordPress.tv is the project’s archive for WordCampWordCamp 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. sessions, contributor talks, and community content. Hundreds of people give talks at WordCamps every year, and for many, that presentation represents months of preparation and talent shared freely with the community. For years, though, speakers whose talks lived only on WPTV were missing an enormous potential audience on YouTube, one of the largest search engines in the world.

In 2022, a seven-year-old Trac ticket was finally closed, and new content from WordPress.tv began automatically uploading to the WordPress YouTube channel. Recent enhancements have added error handling for issues like APIAPI 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. rate limits, failed uploads, and duplicate entries, and videos now auto-publish with thumbnails and metadata intact rather than requiring manual review. Every WordCamp speaker, every contributor who shares their expertise, and every community video that lands on WordPress.tv now reaches YouTube’s audience automatically. The channel had roughly 14,000 subscribers before the automation launched. Today, it has over 117,000, and annual watch time has grown from about 15,000 hours to over 75,000. The community’s collective knowledge is reaching more people than ever before.

Showcase

The WordPress Showcase highlights the best sites built on WordPress, and in doing so, honors those who built them. Work on the current version began as early as 2015, but a whole new Showcase didn’t launch until late 2023, bringing with it a refreshed design, cleaned-up entries, and a rethought moderation process.

In 2025, automation began replacing the most time-consuming manual steps. Submissions are now ingested into a shared Google Sheet, automatically verified as running WordPress, and rated on a five-star scale by AI, which evaluates each site’s content, authority, and design alongside external data like page rank. Each rating comes with a written rationale, so a reviewer can quickly see why a site scored the way it did. Qualifying sites are then submitted as GitHubGitHub 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/ issues in the Showcase GitHub project, complete with AI-generated copy. What used to take weeks of coordination can now be done in minutes, which means the people who submit their sites see their work recognized faster.

Last year, over 600,000 users visited the Showcase, contributing to more than 1.3 million page views. For visitors whose WordPress.orgWordPress.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/ session begins at the Showcase, organic search is the most common entry point, meaning people are actively looking for examples of what WordPress can do and finding the work of the creators who built them.

What Comes Next

There is room to close the gap further. If you have ideas, or if you’ve already built something that helps surface or distribute WordPress community content, share it in the comments (a prompt, an agent, a Zapier workflow). The best way to move this forward is the open source way: show what’s possible, and build on each other’s work.

+make.wordpress.org/community/
+make.wordpress.org/tv/
+make.wordpress.org/ai/

X-post: Elevating Individuals

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X-post: Call for Mentors

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X-post: A Little (Late) Spring Cleaning

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X-post: Criteria for Creating or Migrating Repositories under the WordPress GitHub Organization

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Social icons across WordPress.org

Thanks to @bjmcsherry, @dd32, and @ryelle, all of our active social platforms are now represented in the footer of WordPress.orgWordPress.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/: X, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, TikTok, YouTube, and Tumblr. Since switching to Postpone as our new scheduling tool last month, we’ve been able to reliably schedule and share content with our audience of 2.4 million followers across all of these platforms.

Expand / Include all of the WordPress social media accounts #689

While we do optimize post times and content for each platform, you can expect similar updates across platforms (I.e. no worries about missing out if you’re only on Bluesky or Mastodon). As a reminder, requests to amplify WordPress project content across social media can be made in Github using the “Request for Amplification” issue template.

WPTV-to-YouTube Sync Resumes

The automated WordPress.tv to YouTube sync has been restored. This semi-automated process brings videos posted to WordPress.tv, primarily recordings from WordCamps and other WordPress events, over to the official WordPress YouTube channel.

This sync was paused in October 2024 to allow for a reevaluation of the video pipeline and content strategy. However, Q1 metrics show a 38% decline in YouTube subscriber growth compared to Q1 2024, along with a noticeable dip in average watch time. These trends highlight the importance of continuing to bring community-generated content to the platform—including WordCampWordCamp 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. sessions.

WordPress’s official YouTube channel recently surpassed 110,000 subscribers, underscoring its reach as a hub for education, inspiration, and connection. Reinstating the WPTV sync will ensure that videos from WordCamps around the world continue to be shared and viewed widely, supporting the project’s goal of representing the global WordPress community.

If YouTube isn’t your preferred platform, WordPress is also represented on X, Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon, Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Twitch, TikTok, and Tumblr.

+make.wordpress.org/tv/ +make.wordpress.org/training/

#automation, #social, #wptv, #youtube