WordPress Campus Connect transcends the conventional workshop model by fostering a holistic learning community. It couples on-campus event learning with a diverse range of post-event activities, including meetups, website challenges, scholarships, and volunteering opportunities, all geared towards nurturing student development. The program’s efficacy has prompted other organizations in India to express interest in replicating its structure.

Looking ahead, multiple local WordPress communities in India aim to reach more students in India through WordPress Campus Connect events. The curriculum will include beginner content, delve into more advanced WordPress concepts, and feature specialized sessions tailored for students with prior WordPress experience. 

The official recognition of WordPress Campus Connect as an event series paves the way for further expansion, giving the series similar support and standing as WordCamps but with a student education-first goal and focus. Future plans include organizing large-scale student events, establishing WordPress clubs on college campuses, and facilitating mentorship connections for students.

To support these ambitious goals, volunteers identified several key next steps:

• Volunteer Handbook Development: Creating a comprehensive guidebook to equip volunteers with the necessary resources and information.
• GatherPress Integration: Exploring the feasibility of integrating GatherPress as a tool for student groups.
• Volunteer Recruitment: Actively seeking and onboarding volunteers to support WordPress Campus Connect initiatives through activities such as:
  1. Creating a workflow and guidelines for processing Student Club applications
  2. On-site facilitation or assistance for WordPress Campus Connect events
• Landing Page Creation: Creating a landing page describing what WordPress Campus Connect is all about
• Student Groups: Drafting a framework for students to create their own groups for hosting WordPress events and activities. 

The overwhelming success of WordPress Campus Connect and the enthusiasm it has generated serve as a testament to the transformative power of passion and dedication. As WordPress Campus Connect continues to evolve and expand, it holds the promise of shaping the future of WordPress education and community engagement.

If you’re interested in helping shape the future of education with WordPress, join us in the #campusconnect Make Slack channel today!

In nearly 1,000 days, the WordPress community has created 1,000 Block themes—coming together to use the full potential of the Site Editor and unleash new creative possibilities for everyone.

First introduced in WordPress 5.9, Block themes have steadily evolved, improving flexibility and functionality for themers, users, and agencies alike. Now, design tools allow customizing almost every detail. With style variations, users can change the overall look of their site in a few clicks. You can even use curation options to customize the editing process itself. But we’re not done! We can’t wait to keep pushing Block themes even further. Thank you to every early adopter who, by embracing early features with passion, helped shape the Block themes we love today with feedback and testing.

If you haven’t yet explored Block themes, check out some of the resources below to get inspired:

• Use one of the 1,000 Block themes available and see what you can create. For an easy way to explore, try WordPress Playground to quickly get started with a temporary site. 
• Read the Theme handbook to understand types of themes, how themes work, and how to get started building. 
• Use the Create Block Theme plugin to streamline Block theme creation with a dedicated tutorial on Learn WordPress that will help you get started.  
• Get inspired by watching and joining community members building themes together. This is a great way for folks new to Block themes to learn, hands-on. 

Let’s celebrate and share our contributions! Please comment on the Theme Team’s post dedicated to highlighting this milestone to share your favorite Block theme and thank those who have contributed along the way. 

Thank you to @kristastevens for editorial help, @beafialho for the featured image, and @kafleg for reviewing.

Why This Addition Matters

The relationships we build within our community often involve private discussions. These conversations may involve sensitive matters, personal experiences, or simply casual exchanges. Regardless of the content, every individual should feel confident that their private communications will remain private unless they grant explicit permission to share them.

Sharing private messages without consent is a breach of trust that can also lead to unintended harm, including emotional distress or misrepresentation. When members of our community feel they cannot trust others in their personal conversations, it undermines the collaborative spirit that is crucial to our collective success.

How This Change Protects the Community

By explicitly addressing the publication of private messages without consent, we are reinforcing an existing unacceptable behavior in our Community Code of Conduct: Other conduct which could reasonably be considered inappropriate in a professional setting. Sharing private communications without permission is a clear violation of professional integrity.

This new addition ensures that private messages receive the same level of protection as personal information and that sensitive communications shared in confidence will not be disclosed without prior consent. An important exception to this is when sharing private messages is necessary for reporting incidents or concerns to the Incident Response Team, as part of our commitment to maintaining a safe and respectful environment.

Ultimately, this change encourages honest, constructive engagement across all levels of participation.

Moving Forward Together

The strength of our community lies in the trust we place in one another. By clarifying and reinforcing our expectations, we are taking another step toward maintaining an inclusive, respectful, and safe environment for everyone.This new addition will take effect immediately, and violations will be handled in accordance with our existing enforcement guidelines. Together, we can ensure our community remains a place of collaboration, trust, and mutual respect.

Because of my friendships with the co-founders of Slack, Stewart Butterfield and Cal Henderson, WordPress.org has had a free version of the Pro version of Slack since they started in 2009. We switched from IRC to Slack, and it was like superpowers were unlocked for our team.

Over the past 10 years, Slack has been our secret weapon of productivity compared to many other open source projects. Its amazing collaboration features have allowed us to scale WordPress from running just a few blogs to now powering around 43% of all websites in the world, almost 10 times the runner-up in the market.

As we have scaled from very small to very large, Slack has scaled right alongside us, seemingly effortlessly. WordPress.org currently has 49,286 users on its Slack Business+ instance, which would cost at least $8.8M/yr if we were paying. (And we may need to go to their enterprise grid, to support e-discovery in the lawsuit attacks from WP Engine, which would cost even more.)

This incredible generosity was continued by the enlightened leadership of Marc Benioff at Salesforce when they bought Slack in 2020. However, it has not been widely known or recognized on our Five for the Future page, which only highlights self-reported contributor hours and doesn’t mention Salesforce at all.

This is a grave error, and we are correcting it today. Going forward:

• I would like every business in the world to see the amazing collaboration and productivity gains Slack has enabled for our community of tens of thousands of volunteers worldwide and consider adopting it for their own business.
• Salesforce will have a complimentary top sponsor slot at our flagship WordCamp events in the United States, Europe, and Asia, which attract thousands of people each.
• We will update our Five for the Future program to reflect contributions such as Salesforce’s going forward.

We just want to repeat: Thank you. We hope to deepen our partnership with Salesforce in the future.

On WP Engine’s homepage, they promise “Unmatched performance, automated updates, and bulletproof security ensure your sites thrive.”

WP Engine was well aware that we could remove access when they chose to ignore our efforts to resolve our differences and enter into a commercial licensing agreement. Heather Brunner, Lee Wittlinger, and their Board chose to take this risk. WPE was also aware that they were placing this risk directly on WPE customers. You could assume that WPE has a workaround ready, or they were simply reckless in supporting their customers. Silver Lake and WP Engine put their customers at risk, not me.

We have lifted the blocks of their servers from accessing ours, until October 1, UTC 00:00. Hopefully this helps them spin up their mirrors of all of WordPress.org’s resources that they were using for free while not paying, and making legal threats against us.

WP Engine needs a trademark license, they don’t have one. I won’t bore you with the story of how WP Engine broke thousands of customer sites yesterday in their haphazard attempt to block our attempts to inform the wider WordPress community regarding their disabling and locking down a WordPress core feature in order to extract profit.

What I will tell you is that, pending their legal claims and litigation against WordPress.org, WP Engine no longer has free access to WordPress.org’s resources.

WP Engine wants to control your WordPress experience, they need to run their own user login system, update servers, plugin directory, theme directory, pattern directory, block directory, translations, photo directory, job board, meetups, conferences, bug tracker, forums, Slack, Ping-o-matic, and showcase. Their servers can no longer access our servers for free.

The reason WordPress sites don’t get hacked as much anymore is we work with hosts to block vulnerabilities at the network layer, WP Engine will need to replicate that security research on their own.

Why should WordPress.org provide these services to WP Engine for free, given their attacks on us?

WP Engine is free to offer their hacked up, bastardized simulacra of WordPress’s GPL code to their customers, and they can experience WordPress as WP Engine envisions it, with them getting all of the profits and providing all of the services.

If you want to experience WordPress, use any other host in the world besides WP Engine. WP Engine is not WordPress.

I spoke yesterday at WordCamp about how Lee Wittlinger at Silver Lake, a private equity firm with $102B assets under management, can hollow out an open source community. (To summarize, they do about half a billion in revenue on top of WordPress and contribute back 40 hours a week, Automattic is a similar size and contributes back 3,915 hours a week.) Today, I would like to offer a specific, technical example of how they break the trust and sanctity of our software’s promise to users to save themselves money so they can extract more profits from you.

WordPress is a content management system, and the content is sacred. Every change you make to every page, every post, is tracked in a revision system, just like the Wikipedia. This means if you make a mistake, you can always undo it. It also means if you’re trying to figure out why something is on a page, you can see precisely the history and edits that led to it. These revisions are stored in our database.

This is very important, it’s at the core of the user promise of protecting your data, and it’s why WordPress is architected and designed to never lose anything.

WP Engine turns this off. They disable revisions because it costs them more money to store the history of the changes in the database, and they don’t want to spend that to protect your content. It strikes to the very heart of what WordPress does, and they shatter it, the integrity of your content. If you make a mistake, you have no way to get your content back, breaking the core promise of what WordPress does, which is manage and protect your content.

Here is a screenshot of their support page saying they disable this across their 1.5 million WordPress installs.

They say it’s slowing down your site, but what they mean is they want to avoid paying to store that data. We tested revisions on all of the recommended hosts on WordPress.org, and none disabled revisions by default. Why is WP Engine the only one that does? They are strip-mining the WordPress ecosystem, giving our users a crappier experience so they can make more money.

What WP Engine gives you is not WordPress, it’s something that they’ve chopped up, hacked, butchered to look like WordPress, but actually they’re giving you a cheap knock-off and charging you more for it.

This is one of the many reasons they are a cancer to WordPress, and it’s important to remember that unchecked, cancer will spread. WP Engine is setting a poor standard that others may look at and think is ok to replicate. We must set a higher standard to ensure WordPress is here for the next 100 years.

If you are a customer of “WordPress Engine,” you should contact their support immediately to at least get the 3 revisions they allow turned on so you don’t accidentally lose something important. Ideally, they should go to unlimited. Remember that you, the customer, hold the power; they are nothing without the money you give them. And as you vote with your dollars, consider literally any other WordPress host as WP Engine is the only one we’ve found that completely disables revisions by default.

In this edition, we feature Sunita Rai, a content marketer originally from a remote village in the hills of Nepal. Sunita’s journey to academic and professional success, with help from the WordPress community, will inspire many.

A strong desire to acquire knowledge

Schools first opened in Sunita’s village in the late 1970s, but most locals, including her parents, had neither the funds nor opportunities to complete their education. Over the years, they realized that an education could open doors for their children. Sunita’s parents vowed to ensure she received a full education, no matter the costs or hardships.

Her father worked as a seasonal laborer in India and ensured Sunita and her siblings could go to school with the proper supplies. Her mother cared for everything at home, both the family and the farm. Money was scarce, but determination was abundant.

To finish high school, Sunita moved in with her aunt in a nearby city. After graduation, she worked as a teacher. One of the biggest challenges was speaking and writing in English, a requirement for her first job teaching at a private English-language school. Her own education had used Nepali as the language of instruction. Fortunately, she enjoyed writing in English and became more fluent with practice. She discovered that she would always want a career where she could continue learning.

On top of a demanding teaching schedule, Sunita continued her studies at a college affiliated with Tribhuvan University. She knew that doing both would be difficult, but she wanted to be able to support her family while pursuing ambitious life and career goals. Earning a bachelor’s degree was a hugely motivating achievement that inspired her to begin a master’s degree in sociology.

Teaching for more than five years had been a full-time commitment, with hours of extra work at home. Preparing lessons, grading assignments, and handling exams made it difficult for her to find the time needed for her own studies. Sunita decided she needed more time for her coursework, so she left her teaching job and sought work that would allow her to focus on her studies while still earning money.

From teaching to writing to WordPress

After an extensive search, Sunita landed a content writing job at a successful WordPress development firm in Nepal. Her salary as a content writer wasn’t high, but it grew steadily over time. She would later gain some supplementary freelance work after presenting at a WordCamp. She was able to help support her family as she grew in her career, and now she could do more.

I’m fortunate to have had the education that gave me the capacity to aspire, get into a WordPress job, meet people from around the world, and tell my story!

Sunita

Early in her career, especially in her early days with WordPress, Sunita benefited from the support of excellent mentors who played pivotal roles in her career development, nurturing her skills in content writing, SEO, and general confidence. Now, she has mentored other content writers and advocates for mentoring programs.

Sunita has engaged in WordCamps, sharing her wealth of knowledge and experiences. Her first WordCamp was WordCamp Nepal 2015, a pivotal moment where she connected with WordPress enthusiasts from various Nepalese and international companies. She experienced a welcoming environment that inspired her to become involved in the WordPress community.

At WordCamp Kathmandu in 2016, Sunita delivered a talk on SEO Copywriting for WordPress, marking a significant milestone in her journey. She later joined a panel discussion titled “Girls in WordPress – Story, Experience, Opportunity, and Career” at WordCamp Biratnagar 2018.

Most recently, Sunita helped organize speakers at WordCamp Kathmandu 2022 and 2023, and also spoke outside her home country at WordCamp Asia 2023 and WordCamp Sylhet, Bangladesh 2023. These events and her talks, helped her grow stronger connections within the global WordPress community and encourage more women speakers.

Translating WordPress and empowering others

Reading and writing in your own language is powerful. For Sunita, translation is crucial in bridging gaps and granting access to those with limited platforms to express and share their passions. When she discovered that she could translate WordPress into Nepali, she joined the many other volunteers on the Polyglots team.

“Translating WordPress to Nepali means empowering my people to access the freedom that WordPress provides.” 

Sunita Rai

Sunita emphasizes that coding skills are not a prerequisite for contribution: “The potential impact you can have on the WordPress community is enormous, across areas from local meetups and WordCamps to testing and translating.”

She highlights her own experience as a potential path for others. “WordPress has had a profound impact on my life… the freedom to work on my own time, to be financially independent, and to overcome my inferiority complex.”

Her advice to anyone getting started with WordPress: “Get involved in the WordPress community and contribute as early as possible. By participating, you will better understand the project and its people, so you can advocate WordPress in a better way. It will offer you a sense of satisfaction or meaning as well as success in your career.”

Share the stories

Help share these open source contributor stories and grow the community. Meet more WordPressers in the People of WordPress series, or continue your own WordPress journey at Learn.WordPress.org

Thanks to Sunita Rai for sharing about her adventures in WordPress, and to Abha Thakor, Nalini Thakor, Pooja Derashri, Meher Bala, Nicholas Garofalo, Chloe Bringmann, Maja Loncar and Mary Baum for interviews, editorial, images, and reviews.

This People of WordPress feature is inspired by an essay originally published on HeroPress.com, a community initiative created by Topher DeRosia. It highlights people in the WordPress community who have overcome barriers and whose stories might otherwise go unheard. #HeroPress

Artemy Kaydash discovered that working with WordPress has opened possibilities greater than he imagined. For him, the “active, responsive, and enthusiastic community” makes the software fresh and alive with many ways to experiment and practice adapting it for clients’ needs.

Back-end development with WordPress has proven to be a rewarding career choice for Artemy. He believes developers can inspire others to choose the same career path by sharing the opportunities and satisfaction of working with the content management system (CMS).

The adventure of learning WordPress

Learning new software can be daunting, but Artemy realized that learning with and from inspiring people makes a real difference: “I vividly remember my first WordPress experience. I was confused, had many questions, and was desperately trying to understand how to do the most simple things.”

Working initially in a small agency in Ukraine, Artemy had basic HTML/CSS skills and had just started learning PHP development. His senior colleagues helped him take his first steps in web development and were patient with his questions.

The agency director later gave him the responsibility of creating a WordPress website for a friend. He recalls being nervous, as he was not yet confident in his PHP skills. Colleagues reassured Artemy as he worked, and he went on to build a career in international web development.

Like many others, Artemy found that experimenting with WordPress intrigued him, and he wanted to learn more about it. Looking back, he said: “The first theme I built was awful. It was composed of my own creative solutions and code snippets I found in searches. It had lots of bugs, but as people say, ‘the first pancake is always a bit tricky.'”

Artemy is a great believer in reflective learning, going back and reviewing a piece of development. He said: “No matter how bad it was, it was my first experience, and I learned a lot about the basic concepts of WordPress. That’s why I believe that learning by doing is the best way to learn something new.”

He added: “My advice to others is don’t be afraid of doing something awful when you create something for the first time. It’s okay. We’ve all been through that initial phase.”

“It’s nice to have a mentor when you learn something new. Luckily, you don’t need a person sitting next to you anymore. All of us have got the best mentor possible: the Internet. If you don’t know how to do something, then search for how other people have done the same thing,” Artemy said.

“No wonder some say that one of the most required skills of every developer is the willingness to learn and to know how to search for information. This is one of the reasons WordPress is one of the best options for beginners. Now there is so much more information and help available to learn, more than there was when I first began.”

Artemy feels that the willingness of others to share their experience and problem-solve together is a big strength of the WordPress community and also the reason for its ongoing success: “When you stumble upon a problem, there’s a high probability that someone already asked the same question on one of the forums or websites. If you’re lucky enough, someone already wrote a post about your problem with a great explanation of how to solve it with examples and code snippets.”

WordPress is for beginners and long-term careers

WordPress is not a software with strict limits, and it can be adapted and used in many different ways by beginners and advanced developers.

I like to learn something that excites me and makes my brain work. With WordPress, I am able to find interesting and creative solutions.

There are so many new things to learn that Artemy decided to stay in web development, and he sees it as a perfect channel for his creativity and abstract thinking. It may seem very different from his initial education in literature, sociology, and philosophy. Still, he has found those studies sharpened his skills for understanding, communicating, and working with clients on creative solutions to challenges.

Artemy enjoys the client side of his work and interacting with different studios and agencies. His international work allows him to use WordPress and WooCommerce in many different environments, both large and small, which keeps the software exciting. He said: “I believe if you want to learn something you have to practice using it a lot. Open source is a big advantage in this.” Artemy found that the more he experiences various sites and clients, the more flexible and helpful he can be in helping them find the right solution.

Inspired to help others use WordPress

A willingness to share and grow skills together is what open source environments champion. This collaborative environment inspired Artemy to focus on using WordPress professionally and to share what he learned. “There is a lot of free code and snippets available for anyone to use. I have been grateful to all of the people who have written answers on sites like Stack Overflow, written blog posts, created free plugins, and other helpful materials. It made me want to help others when I was able to.”

In August 2021, Artemy began blogging about using WordPress: “I like to think that this way I am repaying my learning debt for all the content I have consumed. It makes me happy to see that people really read my posts, and it helps them solve their WordPress problems. So, today, when I face a problem and can’t find the solution, I think it might be a great idea for a new post!”

He also likes to keep up with how other people use WordPress by visiting Stack Overflow, WordPress Facebook groups, and other communities where people ask questions almost daily. He helps where he can in those channels or gains inspiration for new content. He believes Learn.WordPress.org and the Developer Blog are valuable resources for beginners and more advanced developers too. As those resources grow, they will increasingly become a place where others can share their development knowledge and use cases.

Every community is a two-way street

Artemy encourages everyone to become a part of the WordPress community. “There are a lot of opportunities for everyone,” he said. “You can help with the translation of your favorite plugins or themes. You can create your own plugin or become a contributor to an already existing open source plugin. You can write tutorials. You can write reviews helping other people to choose the best option for them. You can help people on support forums.”

Every contribution, big or small, makes WordPress better. It is a great experience to be part of it.

Share the stories

Help share these open source contributor stories and continue to grow the community. Meet more WordPressers in the People of WordPress series.

To discover more about how to use WordPress, and start your own story, visit Learn.WordPress.org.

Thanks to Artemy Kaydash for sharing about his adventures in WordPress, and to Abha Thakor, Nalini Thakor, Meher Bala, Mark Smallman, Nicholas Garofalo, Chloe Bringmann, and Mary Baum for interviews, editorial, images, and reviews.

This People of WordPress feature is inspired by an essay originally published on HeroPress.com, a community initiative created by Topher DeRosia. It highlights people in the WordPress community who have overcome barriers and whose stories might otherwise go unheard. #HeroPress

The People of WordPress series shares inspiring stories of how people’s lives can change for the better through WordPress and its global community of contributors.

Ihtisham, from Haripur, a city in northern Pakistan, said: “The WordPress community made me a firm believer in the power of open source software. This is why I am an enthusiast and one who enjoys contributing back to the community via writing, speaking, and helping organize meetups.”

When Ihtisham discovered WordPress, his fascination for working with computing grew. He knew he did not want to just work in administration his entire career.

Ihitsham describes himself as an ‘introvert’ and therefore the idea of remote work appealed as he could still add value to others through technology. He was intrigued by the thought of the freedom to choose his work hours. However, without access to others who had already transformed their careers and lives through web development, he felt he ‘had no path to follow to turn my dream into a reality.’

Challenges become opportunities to learn when there is an active community  

Lacking any kind of informed support network to advise or guide him, Ihtisham devoted time to online research to find the next steps he could take. Looking back, he believes that for those who are not in a network with others with similar interests, it can be hard to keep learning and experimenting with new things. Isolation can be a barrier to working in web development.  

He said: “I think it is not easy to stay motivated when there aren’t immediate rewards for the hard work we do. Sometimes, weeks would go by when my only focus would be to stay motivated rather than give up.”

After another two years of combining learning and work, Ihtisham took up using WordPress as a full-time career. He moved to the capital of Pakistan, Islamabad. It was not easy at first. He recalls: “After many failed attempts at getting hired and desperate moments, I finally received an offer from a digital agency as a web developer focused on the WordPress platform.”

He added: “Moving to work with a bigger agency was one of the best decisions of my life as it helped me with my professional growth by becoming familiar with the whole WordPress ecosystem in a supportive environment. I was valued for my opinions in the web projects in which I was involved. I was also appreciated and encouraged for the open source work I did for the company.” He summarized his enthusiasm for WordPress like this: “It is really interesting figuring out what is happening in the backends. I like problem-solving and finding solutions which you can do with WordPress.”

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Ihtisham moved to join a start-up which provides web development services to international clients. He works as a developer and has the opportunity to learn more about client communication and project management. “WordPress has opened up so many opportunities for me. It has been an exciting journey for me with lots of learning every day,” he said. In particular, he has discovered an interest in APIs and regularly uses his spare time to follow tickets in the hope of one day contributing even more to topics.

Give back through WordPress community

It was not just software that made a difference in Ihtisham’s life. Joining a welcoming and sharing community was transforming for him. Recalling those early days of isolation, he values the WordPress community and is wholly committed to the power of open-source software. He now enjoys writing, speaking, and organizing meetups to give back to the community. He has been involved in developing plugins and themes for the platform, which he describes as a ‘humbling’ experience. He is fond of WordCamp Islamabad and in 2023 is on the organizing team to help bring both WordPress and its community to others in Pakistan.

“My first experience,” he said, “was that everyone was so friendly and open to sharing what they have learned, even though they were all busy working. This really had an impact on me. It really helped me and gave me the confidence that I could work with WordPress…. It was a real step forward for me joining this community.”

A particular meeting in 2018 led to new friendships through the WordPress community. Ihtisham was on a train to Karachi for the first ever Pakistani WordCamp in 2018 and met a group of fellow attendees he now regards as close friends. What impressed him most about the camp was that although he met many people with considerable expertise, they also had a generosity of spirit and humbleness in their willingness to share this knowledge. Now, with this group of friends he is fulfilling another dream of traveling widely across the country. He says these things and other ‘side benefits’ have been made possible by the WordPress community, and for that, he is ‘forever grateful’.

Ihtisham particularly wanted to share his story through this People of WordPress article to encourage those starting with little or no support to remain persistent. He knows from experience breaking into the tech world can be hard, especially when you may be switching from doing something else and have no ‘track record’ to offer.

He feels he is a living example of how perseverance can lead to success. He offers these words to anyone thinking of making a move into development using the WordPress platform: “I attribute my success (financial and mental well-being) to the open-source nature of WordPress and its amazing community. It would not be possible to learn and use the plethora of free tools WordPress provides if it weren’t an open-source platform. It is for that reason I feel obligated to contribute back to this platform to the best of my abilities.” To those who are finding getting going difficult, as he did, he adds: “Get yourself a clear learning path and just dive in doing WordPress, and things will get better for you over time as they were for me, I promise. Good Luck!”

Share the stories

Help share these stories of open source contributors and continue to grow the community. Meet more WordPressers in the People of WordPress series.

To help you discover more about how to use the WordPress software, there is a free resource from the community, Learn.WordPress.org

Contributors

Thanks to Ihtisham Zahoor (@shaampk1) for sharing about his adventures in WordPress.

Thank you to Abha Thakor (@webcommsat), Nalini Thakor (@nalininonstopnewsuk), and Meher Bala (@meher) for interviews, the feature and collaborating on images. To Chloe Bringmann (@cbringmann), Mark Smallman (@marks99), and Mary Baum (@marybaum) for reviews. Thanks to the late Surendra Thakor (@sthakor), Maja Loncar (@majaloncar), Maedah Bahtool (@maedahbatool) and other members of the Marketing and Polyglots Team for their contributions.

The People of WordPress series thanks Josepha Haden (@chanthaboune) and Topher DeRosia (@topher1kenobe) for their support.

This People of WordPress feature is inspired by an essay originally published on HeroPress.com, a community initiative created by Topher DeRosia. It highlights people in the WordPress community who have overcome barriers and whose stories might otherwise go unheard. #HeroPress