Iker Santos

This week was about moving from “learning about WordPress” to actually choosing how I want to contribute to it. After going through the Contributor Team Deep Dive lesson, which walks through all the different teams you can join, from Core and Design to Documentation, Support, and more — I had to pick where to focus my energy.

I chose two teams to explore: Photos and Playground Blueprints. I chose Photos because I come from an audiovisual background, and photography has been something I’ve genuinely loved for a long time, so contributing to the WordPress Photo Directory felt like a natural fit rather than just “another team to try.”

On the Playground side, I chose to look into Blueprints specifically. Part of it was simply liking the challenge — Blueprints are more technical than anything I’d touched so far in the course, since they involve defining WordPress environments through structured JSON configuration rather than just uploading content through a UI. Coming from the DAM program, where I already work with code and application logic, this felt like a natural stretch: a chance to apply some of what I’m learning in Java and development in general to a real WordPress tool. I also liked that Blueprints sit at the intersection of contribution and building; instead of submitting existing work, I’d be helping create something other people use to spin up WordPress instances instantly, which felt like a more “developer-facing” way to contribute than I’d expected to find this early in the course.

What I did this week

I read through the Photos Team handbook to understand how the directory works: it’s a curated source of free, high-quality photographs that also feeds into Openverse, WordPress’s open media search engine. Every photo submitted is meant to be released under a CC0 public domain license, and submissions go through a moderation process before being published. Once I understood how it worked, I created a WordPress.org account-linked profile for submissions and started uploading some of my own photography.

What was hard — and how it went

At first it stung a little; I’d taken the photo thinking it was solid, but going back and comparing it against the guidelines helped me see exactly what the moderators were looking for. My subject wasn’t as sharply in focus as I’d assumed, and there was a bit of noise I hadn’t noticed on a smaller screen. I re-checked my other submissions against that same checklist (composition, lighting, focus, color, no blur/noise/flare/spots) before uploading anything else, and the next photos I submitted were approved without issues.

Challenges & what I learned

This rejection ended up teaching me more than an easy approval would have. The Photo Directory isn’t just a place to upload nice pictures; it holds a real quality bar because every image becomes free, reusable content for the entire WordPress community through Openverse. That context changed how I look at my own photography: it’s not enough for a photo to look good at a glance; it has to hold up at full resolution, on different screens, and under close inspection of focus and noise.

I also learned to treat moderation feedback as a checklist rather than a judgment. Once I stopped reading the rejection as “your photo isn’t good enough” and started reading it as “here’s exactly what to check next time,” submitting became much less stressful — and more useful as a way to actually improve as a photographer, not just as a contributor. It reinforced something I already believed but hadn’t tested directly: contributing to an open-source project often means your work gets reviewed against real standards, and that’s a feature of the system, not an obstacle.