The Trip That Lit the Fire: My WordPress contribution journey Since WordCamp Asia 2025

My WordPress contribution journey didn't start at WordCamp Asia 2025. It started back in January 2016, and I joined the WP Surat community in 2017. But if I'm honest, something shifted in Manila. That's the trip that lit a fire in me.

I started my WordPress contribution journey a long time ago, back in January 2016, and joined the WP Surat community in 2017. But if I’m honest, something shifted at WordCamp Asia 2025 in Manila. That’s the trip that lit a fire in me. So this is my contribution journey from WordCamp Asia 2025 to today: about eighteen months that took me from a volunteer’s badge to leading Surat’s first WordCamp, organizing WordPress Campus Connect across three colleges, and shipping my first plugins on WordPress.org.

I’m writing it down for two reasons. First, for anyone in a smaller Indian city who wonders whether they can build a WordPress community where none existed. You can. Second, because honest records matter. So this post has the wins, the numbers, and the parts that were not easy.

Where My WordPress Contribution Journey Began

I’ve been building with WordPress professionally since January 2016 and have been part of the WP Surat community since 2017. By early 2025, I had attended WordCamps across India, micro-sponsored several of them, led a project at do_action Bhopal 2024, and spoken at WordCamp Delhi 2024. The full list of events is on my WordPress.org profile. This post is about what came next.

WordCamp Asia 2025: Volunteering in Manila

In February 2025, my first-ever international journey started in Surat, went to Mumbai, and then, from Mumbai airport, continued via Singapore to Manila.

I volunteered at WordCamp Asia 2025 in Manila, which earned me the WordCamp Volunteer badge. I also added a photo to the WordPress Photo Directory that mont:, a bird’s-eye view of Singapore airport.

As a volunteer, I worked two very different roles:

• Day 1: Registration Desk. I was one of the first faces attendees saw, checking people in, handing out badges and swag, and helping them find their way around the venue.
• Day 2: Accessibility Support. I helped make sure every attendee could move around, reach sessions, and take part in the event comfortably.

Seeing a flagship event run from the inside, from the first check-in to the small details that make an event accessible, taught me more about organizing than any handbook. Many of those lessons went straight into WordCamp Surat later that year.

Beyond the main event, I joined three sponsor-hosted side events:

• Elementor & Hostinger Manila Mingle, February 20, 8:00 PM – 12:00 AM, right after Contributor Day. It had an open bar and snacks, and it was a great way to unwind and connect with people from across the community.
• Site Kit: Features, Tips and Tricks Workshop by Google, held at the Google Manila office in Taguig. Only 40 seats were available, so I was glad to get one.
• Woo Community Meetup at the C Lounge, Conrad Manila, with views over Manila Bay.

These side events were where many of the real conversations happened, away from the rush of the conference hall.

WP Campus Connect Kolhapur 2025: Seeing What Students Need

Next, I served as a Facilitator at WordPress Campus Connect Kolhapur 2025, at one of its four partner colleges: Kolhapur Institute of Technology’s College of Engineering (KITCoEK). Founded in 1983, it was Maharashtra’s first self-financed engineering college. It’s an NAAC A+ institution, and more than 100 of its students are listed as attendees on the campus page, supported by five student campus volunteers. It was my first close look at Campus Connect, and it planted the idea of bringing the same programme to Surat.

Alongside one other facilitator, I taught a hands-on session on building a page in WordPress using Elementor. For many of the students, it was their first time creating a real page with a visual builder, and seeing it come together on their own screens was the best part of the day.

WordCamp Surat 2025: Putting South Gujarat on the Map

On 16 November 2025, WordCamp Surat 2025 took place at SSASIT College, Varachha. It was the first WordCamp ever held in South Gujarat, and I had the privilege of being its Lead Organizer.
Alongside a helping hand from community member Aditya Kane (WP Pune), also the mentor for WC Surat 2025.

• 454 attendees for a first-time WordCamp in a city that had never hosted one.
• We finished with a surplus, and it went back to the WordPress Foundation.
• It earned me the WordCamp Organizer badge, but more importantly, it gave Surat a place in the WordPress community.

Regular tickets sold out before the day. It ran from 8:00 AM to 5:30 PM, with a programme built around our community.

The organizing team

I led a team of fifteen local community members. Alongside me were Hardik Kukadiya, Alkesh Miyani, Amitkumar Dudhat, Maulik Vora, Rahul Dungarani, Prashant Baldha, Priyanka Sida, Priyanka Nasit, Janki Makwana, Darshan Chauhan, Dishant Patel, Ashok Luhar, Kishan Jasani, and Nikunj Hatkar. WordCamp Surat was their WordCamp as much as mine.

Speakers

We had 18 speakers across the day, including Parth Pandya (KrishaWeb), Hindustani Modi (IQONIC Design), Vachan Kudmule (KDC), Amit Singh (WPoets), Makarand Mane (WPGenius), Abhay Kulkarni, Mayank Kumar, Mohit Savaliya, Gautam Garg (Knit Pay), Anindo Neel Dutta, Dilip Modhavadiya, Drashti Modi, Parin Panjari (Huptech), Prachetshi Basu (WP Event Manager), Rahul D Sarker, Ranu Patel (Tarasaka), and Nikunj Hatkar.

Sponsors

WordCamp Surat stayed accessible and community-focused because of our sponsors. Our global sponsors were Automattic, Bluehost, Hosting.com, Kinsta, and Woo. On the Silver tier, we had Elementor, E2M, Collabrise, and GSheetConnector; on the Bronze tier, Zluck Solutions, Knit Pay, Infinite Uploads, FluidHost, and Geek Web Solution. WP Event Manager, a Surat-based team, sponsored too, and WPVaat and WPSimplified came on as media partners. I wrote and published the thank-you post for each sponsor myself, along with the Call for Sponsors and the travel and stay guides, so the site told the full story before the day.

The day also had sponsor booths, an after-party, and a closing ceremony where speakers were felicitated and lucky-draw winners were announced.

WordCamp Bhopal 2025: Supporting Another Camp

A month later, in December, I was a Micro Sponsor at WordCamp Bhopal 2025. After organizing a camp myself, I understood better than ever how much every sponsor, however small, helps.

WordCamp Kolhapur 2026: Back on Stage

At the second edition of WordCamp Kolhapur (31 Jan – 1 Feb 2026, DYPSEM, Kolhapur), I was both a Speaker and a Micro Sponsor.

My session was WP-CLI Basics: Supercharging Your WordPress Workflow from Day One, on 1 February at 11:30 am in Track 2 (Classroom 1). It was aimed at beginners: how to simplify workflows, cut repetitive tasks, and work faster with WP-CLI, drawing on what I’ve learned from building WordPress systems in production.

WordCamp Asia 2026: Volunteering at Home

In April 2026, WordCamp Asia came to India for the first time, at the Jio World Convention Centre in Mumbai (9–11 April). I returned as a Volunteer and also served as a Co-Facilitator on Contributor Day. Going from volunteer in Manila to volunteer and co-facilitator in Mumbai felt like a full circle.

Contributor Day 2026 introduced a set of hands-on beginner workshops, and I co-facilitated the “Beginner’s Guide to WordPress” workshop (9:30–11:00 AM) alongside Jamie Marsland as Lead Facilitator and fellow co-facilitator Rajan Lama. It was a guided introduction to WordPress for people completely new to the platform, helping them build the confidence to start contributing. After being a first-timer myself not long ago, helping others take that first step meant a lot.

WordPress Campus Connect Surat 2026

After WordCamp Surat, the natural next step was students. I’m the Lead Organizer of WordPress Campus Connect Surat 2026, and I’m also confirmed as a speaker.

• Completed the Campus Connect Organizer Orientation in June 2026 and joined the organizing team the same month.
• We ran campus days across three colleges: SSASIT, JP Dawer College (VNSGU), and TDEC. Combined, that was around 470 registrations and 300+ attendees across the three campuses.
• Built the full nine-page event site on events.wordpress.org: Home, About, Partner Colleges, Call for Sponsors, Sponsors, Organizers, Volunteer, Code of Conduct, and Contact, and wrote the welcome posts for the partner colleges.
• Welcomed Automattic, Bluehost, Hostinger, and Woo as Global Community Partners.
• Registration was manual at first, so I built an online registration and attendance portal with XLS import, QR-based check-in, and CSV export for bulk certificates, so each campus day ran smoother than the last.

Getting WordPress in front of nearly 500 students who’d never touched it before, on their own campuses, is exactly why Campus Connect matters.

Contributing Code and Translations

After years of building custom plugins for clients behind closed doors, I finally started shipping open-source ones under Idara Studio, with full auto-deploy to SVN through GitHub Actions. Here is the honest commit record.

Idara Reading Time (June 2026)

My first plugin in the repository, Idara Reading Time. On 2 June 2026, I pushed the 1.0.0 release across several commits, adding the icon, banner, and screenshots and tagging the build. In August, I followed up with 1.0.1 (tested up to WordPress 7.1, updated the Plugin URI, shipped src/ alongside build/) and 1.0.2. A couple of those August commits were honest little fixes: pointing the Plugin URI at idara.studio after the old link 404’d, and removing an empty tag I’d pushed by accident.

Idara Business Hours (August 2026)

My second plugin, Idara Business Hours, went out as its 1.0.0 initial release on 27 August 2026.

Contributor Photo Gallery

I’m also listed as a contributor on Satyam Vishwakarma’s Contributor Photo Gallery plugin.

Translations and photos

On the Polyglots side, I’ve kept up Hindi (hi_IN) translations, including a batch of 15 strings I suggested on translate.wordpress.org in April 2025. I’ve also contributed to the WordPress Photo Directory.

These plugins earned me the Plugin Developer badge. My profile now shows three plugins, three photos, two completed courses, and translation work, and in the last 12 months, 42 contributions, 41 of them high-impact.

By the Numbers (Feb 2025 – Today)

The Support That Made This Possible

None of this happened alone. Thanks @WordPress for being a part of my life, and for many things won alongside.
Mentors in the community helped me a lot for WC Surat: Vachan Kudmule (WP Mumbai), Meher Bala (WP Mumbai)

Beyond that, local community members: Hardik Kukadiya, Alkesh Miyani, Amitkumar Dudhat, Maulik Vora, Rahul Dungarani, Prashant Baldha, Priyanka Sida, Priyanka Nasit, Janki Makwana, Darshan Chauhan, Dishant Patel, Ashok Luhar, Kishan Jasani, and Nikunj Hatkar.

Apart from that, people like Shape me in a good way; talking to them feels good: Yashwardhan Rana (WP Bhopal), Sunil Kumar Sharma (WP Alwar), Prathamesh Palve (WP Mumbai), Mayank Kumar (WP Delhi).

Note: Kisi ka naam reh gaya ho toh bataa dena please.. bura nhi manna please..

What This WordPress Contribution Journey Taught Me

• A small city can host a big event. Surat didn’t need to be Mumbai or Bengaluru to pull in 454 people. It needed someone to start.
• Every role teaches something. Volunteer, facilitator, sponsor, speaker, organizer. I held all of them in eighteen months, and each showed me a different side of an event.
• Students are the future of this community. Campus Connect reaches people before they’ve picked a stack. That matters.
• Ship your work in the open. Years of client plugins stayed private. Two public plugins did more for my contribution record than all of them.
• Pace yourself. Contribution is a long game.
  
  

What’s Next

This is not the end. If anything, it feels like the middle. A few things I’m working on next:

• Keep improving my plugins. Idara Reading Time and Idara Business Hours are live, and I want to keep refining them, responding to feedback, and shipping updates in the open.
• Volunteer at WordCamp Rajasthan 2026. Back to volunteering, this time at a new WordCamp.
• Speak at WordCamp Bengaluru 2026. A lightning talk, “What AI Got Wrong: An Honest Ledger from Shipping a WordPress.org Plugin”, drawn straight from building Idara Reading Time.
• More Campus Connect in Surat. Three colleges done is a start, not a finish. There are plenty more campuses in South Gujarat.
  
  

Let’s Connect

If you’re a college in Surat that wants to host a Campus Connect day, a company that wants to support WordPress events in South Gujarat, or someone who wants to start contributing and doesn’t know where to begin, reach out. I’m happy to help.

Find me on WordPress.org, LinkedIn, GitHub, or Make WordPress Slack as @sajid_ansari.