Iker Santos

Published under the WordPress Credits category · ikersantos.blog

Introduction

I’m Iker, and this is my final report for the WP Credits program. Over the past several weeks, I contributed to two teams — Photos and Playground — submitting original photography to the WordPress Photo Directory and building a Design System demo Blueprint for WordPress Playground. This report summarizes what I worked on, what I learned, and how the experience shaped me as a contributor, from someone who mixed up WordPress.org and WordPress.com in week one to someone who now has 30+ approved photos and a pull request in an official WordPress repository.

I came into this program from the DAM (Multiplatform Application Development) program, with an audiovisual background and a long-standing love for photography, but with zero experience contributing to open source. WP Credits changed that.

Teams and projects I contributed to

I split my contribution work across two very different teams, which turned out to complement each other well.

Photos Team. My main and most consistent contribution was submitting original photography to the WordPress Photo Directory, a curated library of free, high-quality, CC0-licensed images that also feeds into Openverse. I chose this team because photography is something I’ve genuinely loved for years, coming from an audiovisual background — this felt less like “picking a team” and more like finding a place where something I already cared about could be useful to other people.

Playground Team. My second contribution was building a Blueprint for WordPress Playground — a JSON-based configuration that spins up a fully working WordPress demo in the browser with no server required. I built canvas-ui-lab, a Design System / UI Kit demo environment: it installs Twenty Twenty-Four as a neutral base theme, loads a custom mu-plugin that strips default content and injects dark-mode styling with Plus Jakarta Sans typography, and generates an interactive Component Gallery with six cards covering Design Tokens, Micro-Interactions, Responsive Layout, Component Motion, Accessibility Patterns, and Theme Architecture — each linking out to real documentation on MDN, W3C WCAG, and WordPress Developer Resources. I chose this direction to show WordPress as a serious prototyping tool for developers and designers, not just a blogging platform.

Learning resources

I leaned on the official WP Credits course and each team’s handbook throughout the program:

• Onboarding lessons — especially “Differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org,” which I needed after getting confused, not before
• Create your personal website — for setting up ikersantos.blog
• Contribution Team Deep Dive — for choosing Photos and Playground
• The Photos Team Handbook — for understanding submission quality standards
• Build a WordPress Playground Blueprint and the official “Build your first blueprint” tutorial
• The Blueprint Gallery contributing guidelines — for preparing my pull request correctly

Beyond the documentation, I also got a lot from the community itself. I attended an online meetup hosted by Quedadas WordPress Online titled “Equipo de Marketing de WordPress España: cómo colaboramos y qué hacemos”, where speaker Ana Gavilán gave an excellent, down-to-earth talk about the Spanish WordPress Marketing Team from the inside. She did a great job breaking down how the team is structured, who participates, and what it’s actually like to collaborate with them day to day. What stood out to me most was learning how broad the Marketing team’s scope really is — it’s not just promotional work, but also WordPress blog posts, newsletters, and content initiatives that amplify WordPress in Spanish, with room for contributors from very different backgrounds (designers, developers, documentation writers, and people with no marketing experience at all). It gave me a much clearer picture of how many different “entry points” into WordPress contribution actually exist beyond the teams I’d already chosen.

Challenges and solutions

Looking back across the whole program, three challenges stand out as the ones that taught me the most.

1. Mixing up WordPress.org and WordPress.com (Week 1). In my very first week, I registered on the wrong platform, since both share a name, a logo, and similar-looking dashboards. I had to redo my sign-up specifically on WordPress.org, the identity I’d use for every contribution going forward. I solved it by slowing down and reading the onboarding material properly instead of assuming I already understood the ecosystem.

2. A rejected photo submission (Week 4). One of my early photos was rejected from the Photo Directory with specific feedback: “The photo had an issue regarding image quality. Submissions should be of high quality composition, lighting, focus, and color. The image should be free of blur (for the primary subject), noise, lens flare, glare, and spots due to water or dirt on the lens.” Instead of taking it personally, I turned that feedback into a checklist and re-evaluated every future submission against it before uploading. It worked — I now have over 30 approved photos in the directory.

3. Building and submitting a Playground Blueprint correctly (Week 5). My first year in DAM gave me a solid base in JSON, but a Blueprint is a structured sequence of steps with its own API and conventions, not just a data file. Beyond the technical build — getting my custom mu-plugin to load correctly and generate the Component Gallery without breaking — I had to research proper pull request practices for the WordPress/blueprints repository: folder structure, required metadata, and how to write a PR that’s easy for a reviewer to evaluate. My blueprint has received review feedback and requested changes, and I’m currently working through them — a reminder that in open source, “submitted” is rarely the same as “done,” and that’s a normal, expected part of the process rather than a sign of failure.

My contributions

Direct links to what I actually produced during the program:

• Personal WP Credits website: ikersantos.blog — hosting all my weekly journal posts under the WordPress Credits category
• WordPress Photo Directory profile: https://wordpress.org/photos/author/ikeer3/ — 30+ original photographs approved and published under CC0
• Playground Blueprint — canvas-ui-lab: Live demo in WordPress Playground
• Pull Request to WordPress/blueprints: https://github.com/WordPress/blueprints/pull/237 — currently addressing requested changes

Key learnings from the WP Credits program

A few takeaways go beyond any single week or team:

Open source runs on written communication as much as on code or images. Whether it was Slack etiquette, PR descriptions, or moderation feedback on a photo, almost everything in this ecosystem depends on clear, asynchronous writing. Learning “the WordPress voice” back in week one turned out to matter far more than I expected.

Feedback is information, not judgment. Both the photo rejection and the Blueprint review comments stung a little in the moment, but treating them as specific, actionable checklists — rather than verdicts on my ability — was what actually let me improve.

Contribution is a process, not a single submission. My Blueprint still isn’t merged. Early in the course, that might have felt like a failure to report. Now I understand it as a normal middle step: reviewers ask for changes, contributors iterate, and things get merged when they’re ready — not necessarily on the first try. And beyond my own two teams, the marketing team talk reminded me that “contributing to WordPress” covers a much wider range of work than I originally assumed.

New skills gained

Technical:

• Reading and writing WordPress Playground Blueprint JSON, including custom mu-plugin integration
• Understanding the WordPress.org contributor ecosystem: profiles, Slack, team structure, and GitHub-based contribution workflows
• Practical photo quality standards for composition, lighting, focus, and technical cleanliness
• Basic WordPress site setup: theme selection, page/menu structure, categories vs. pages, and responsive image handling

Soft skills:

• Asynchronous communication across a large, distributed community
• Giving myself an honest self-assessment (starting as a “Beginner”) instead of overstating my skill level
• Turning critical feedback into a concrete improvement checklist
• Patience with a slower, iterative contribution process rather than expecting instant approval

Personal reflections and next steps

What surprised me most was how approachable the WordPress community actually is. I came in expecting a large, intimidating open-source project where a beginner might get lost or ignored — instead, documentation was thorough, the marketing team meetup I attended was genuinely welcoming and well presented, and even critical feedback (like my photo rejection) came with a clear explanation rather than a cold dismissal.

What I enjoyed most was the moment things clicked: seeing my own photography live in the Photo Directory, and watching my Blueprint’s Component Gallery load instantly in Playground after days of debugging the mu-plugin. Those were the moments where “learning about WordPress” turned into “actually being part of WordPress.”

Going forward, I plan to keep submitting photography to the Photo Directory — it’s a low-friction way to keep contributing something I love doing anyway — and to see my Blueprint through to a full merge, addressing the review feedback I’ve received. Longer term, I’d like to explore building a second Blueprint, this time for a real community plugin or theme, since the Playground pathway lists that as a natural next step after a first merged Blueprint. I came into WP Credits as a self-declared Beginner with no contribution experience. I’m leaving it with 30+ published photos, an open pull request in an official WordPress repository, and — more importantly — a real understanding of how to keep contributing after the course ends.