GatherPress just celebrated its 5-year anniversary on September 18. That was the first commit I made to the project in 2019. It seemed only fitting that our anniversary was during the week of WordCamp US, where our plugin was officially recognized as a WordPress community project.

It was exciting walking in as a “Table Lead” at WordCamp US Contributor Day and finding the table I would manage with the GatherPress team that would be in attendance. In addition to that, we had a few folks from our team on Zoom, as well as some first time contributors that were participating virtually.

There was a lot of buzz about us on the floor. Some people were familiar, and others just finding out about it that day. Either way, it was exciting making progress on the plugin as well as the sidebar discussions about next steps of powering WordPress meetups on a WordPress.org network powered by GatherPress.

In the end, our first contributor day was a success. We had 5 new people contribute to the project, some of which had code merged that day. We also ended camp with a new #gatherpress channel in the Making WordPress slack. So if you are in that Slack, come checkout our channel and join us!