A community is the strongest asset of any open source 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 WordCamp 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 API 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 GitHub 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.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/