Back in September 2025, I launched a new slack channel dedicated to #content-creators, based on a longstanding passion project. It’s been nearly two years since I started trying to push on uniting creators across the WordPress ecosystem and I still believe strongly that this is a pathway to pursue. What became clear though in the months since the channel was created is that now is not the right time. This comes down to a few facts:
- Low interaction when sharing information.
- Low attendance on dedicated hallway hangouts.
- Low views later on those hallway hangouts.
- Low engagement with folks sharing in the channel overall.
This is beautiful information to listen to! In the same way it’s helpful to see what is working, it’s also important and helpful to pay attention to what’s not. This was not working to the point that I didn’t need to wait a full (arbitrary) six months to make the decision. I’ve felt what it’s like when something is moving and grooving (the FSE Outreach Program felt like this) and when I have the full capacity to get something there. I both don’t have the capacity to drive this in the way I did the FSE Outreach Program and don’t feel the momentum clicking together. I’m bummed but I have clarity here and I think there’s little worse than a dead end space for folks who are keen to find community and contribute. In general though, I think we should embrace this kind of “fast failing” where we can and where there’s low risk.
If I could do it all over again, I would do a few things differently and I share this to help either my future self to try this again or anyone else trying to do things in the WordPress space (this is not exhaustive and I might add more items later):
- Line up clear commitments from partners in this work who can help drive engagement with me (both content creators and folks who work with influencers).
- Establish clearer contribution pathways for content creators ahead of time so there’s more motivation and clarity to get involved.
- Establish rituals sooner (I did this too late) including prompts for folks to engage with each other, sharing in progress work, hallway hangouts, etc. This is a basic tenant of content creation that I didn’t follow!
- Create different spaces (perhaps hallway hangouts) for folks to share in progress work. This could have been perhaps pairing people up. As is, it’s vulnerable to drop a draft into a big slack channel and that clearly didn’t work.
There remains huge blockers in this work, including the lack of a designated contribution pathway, the lack of people to drive this work, and the complexity of how content creators create partnerships that stands in contrast with our general sponsorship model for contributors in general.
In my mind, there still is a way to treat content creation itself as a first‑class, recognized way to contribute to WordPress and our official accounts. Since the early days of WordPress, it’s been normal for contributors to blog about work, write their own tutorials, maintain community resources to varying degrees, and maintain things like plugins or themes. Their individual success keeps them close to the work and is normalized rather than being seen as against the project itself. This is the same case with current content creators who could easily have big revenue streams from their personal accounts and we could apply the same framing to them:
- You can run your own channel, account, podcast, etc.
- You can also offer valuable contributions to official WordPress channels.
- Those contributions to our channels are contributions to the project.
If we define content creation as a contribution pathway, we can build processes, recognition, and support around it just like with code, docs, and events. This would involve create standards and a review process for contributions, a badge, a team, and sponsorship. We’re just not there though and I wonder if an influx of younger, newer contributors through the education programs might change that. The great news is that content creation as is will continue for WordPress and never depended on this channel to begin with.
This isn’t the last of me in this space–my DMs are open to creators to brainstorm/connect/etc, I will continue to share updates now in the #outreach channel rather than #content-creators, and I will continue to think about what we might try here. Thank you to all 161 people who were game to try this new idea and who reacted/joined/shared in the channel. It never ceases to amaze me how vast, deep, and powerful the WordPress world is. I welcome any questions or comments folks have here.
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