HeroPress at WordCamp US 2025!


I wasn’t sure I was going to make it to WordCamp US this year, but at almost the last minute, WordPress.com helped me out with travel and accommodations! More on that below.

The first day was contributor day and I was a table lead. I think we had more people this year than any other year before. I started the day showing 4 or 5 people how to become contributors, and they each uploaded 20 photos or so. All told we moderated about 160 photos during the day, and pushed the total over 26,000. I also made some great new friends!

Photography

For the first time ever I was on the WordCamp Photography team. I feel like it’s a great honor because don’t really think of myself as a photographer, and I don’t even own a “real” camera, I just use my iPhone. I do have some lenses from Moment.io which are cool, but they’re not a patch on some of the big crazy lenses I saw around. I took several hundred pictures over the week, here are just a few:

The Mural

In addition to the regular photos, I got a series of Jax Ko making a WordCamp mural. They painted for 2 straight days, and I took a photo about every 2 hours. Here’s the progression in slideshow format:

How I Got There

As I mentioned at the top, WordPress.com was my sponsor to get to WordCamp US this year. I really wanted to attend, I’ve never missed one! They very generously offered to help me get there and cover my hotel. More than that though, folks from .com at WordCamp sought me out and told me how glad they were that I was there. It was a very welcoming gesture.

If you haven’t looked at WordPress.com for hosting in a while, you should check it out. There have been some substantial changes in the last few years, there are some great new features.

WordPress.com Studio

While many people may have thought of WordPress.com as a “free blog” platform only, WordPress.com has been a full-featured host for years. At the business and commerce plan level the plugin library is available for both free and paid plugins, which is great, and for more advanced users and developers they offer features like staging servers, SSH access, WP-CLI, github deployments, and a local development environment. That local dev environment allows you to copy sites from production to local and then push back to either staging or production. This lets you to work on your site without disrupting your visitors’ experiences.

Even if you don’t have hosting needs at the moment, you can still get involved! They have a great affiliate program, check it out here.



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