I built WPFolks.

If you’ve worked on WordPress for any stretch of time, you’ve probably had this experience. You ship something. A plugin, a theme, a piece of a client project. You want to tell someone. And you open Slack, then Twitter, then the .org forums, then a Facebook group, then maybe Reddit, and nothing feels like the right place for any of it.

I’ve had that experience a lot.

The people part of WordPress is what makes the whole thing work. Every WordCamp I’ve been to has had the same quality. You meet someone over a bad hotel coffee, you both turn out to maintain something the other person depends on, and a useful conversation breaks out. I wanted more of that, not less. But it was getting harder to find those conversations online. The WordPress community is real; its home on the internet just wasn’t.

So a few months ago I started building WPFolks.

What I wanted it to be

A single place for WordPress people to hang out, find things, and find each other. Something that felt like it was built for WordPress developers, freelancers, and agencies, in a way that showed up in the defaults.

Concretely, I wanted:

• A feed where you could post what you were building, ask a question, or share something you found. Chronological, no algorithmic ranking, no ads.
• A plugin directory where community plugins lived alongside their authors, so “the plugin” and “the person who made the plugin” were in the same surface, not two separate searches.
• A jobs board where posting was free and nobody took a cut from applications.
• An events calendar with RSVPs, because I’d shown up at too many WordCamps not knowing who else I knew would be there.
• A profile that pulled in your WordPress.org plugins, badges, and contributions automatically, so you didn’t have to retype things you’d already shipped.
• An ideas board, because I had a folder of “someone should build this” notes and figured other people did too.

And I wanted it free. Not freemium. Not “free for early users.” Free as in nobody pays and nobody is farmed for data.

What I tried first

I spent about two weeks trying to avoid building it.

I made a Notion database of WordPress people I knew. I started a spreadsheet of plugins I wanted to bookmark. I tried to get a Slack going. None of it stuck. What I actually needed was a place. A real URL people could link to. A profile you could show an agency. A listing that showed up when someone Googled your plugin.

So I gave up on avoiding it and started coding.

The build

The whole thing runs on WordPress. Custom theme, custom post types, a few careful plugins. I made a lot of decisions about what not to include. No reactions leaderboard. No streaks. No “you haven’t posted in X days” emails. No feed that rearranges based on what you clicked last. The defaults skew toward “here is the information; now do what you want with it.”

Some things took longer than I expected. Syncing profiles with WordPress.org turned out to involve a lot of careful rate-limiting, because the .org API gets cranky if you ask about the same user too often. Getting events to show in the right timezone for a global audience took three rewrites.

Most of the small decisions were about restraint. It’s easy to ship a social feature. It’s hard to ship a feed that doesn’t manipulate you.

What’s on it now

At launch:

• Plugins submitted by community members, with plugin-author profiles.
• Events with RSVPs, country filtering, and WordCamp sync so the official calendar flows in automatically.
• Jobs posted directly by the people hiring. Free both ways.
• Snippets: short bits of WordPress code organized by hook and problem.
• Resources: tutorials, tools, and courses shared by the community, with upvotes.
• Ideas: a board where you can post plugin and theme ideas, and claim ones you want to build.
• Deals posted by the people making the plugins, not third-party affiliates.
• Community feed for questions, shop talk, and #buildinpublic updates.
• A weekly newsletter on Fridays, summarizing what’s new.
• A Community Fund, where 30% of every sponsorship dollar is used for WordCamp travel grants providing scholarships for developers who cannot afford the costs along with plugin maintainer stipends and support for small WordPress community events like meetups and WordCamps.

Every profile pulls from WordPress.org automatically if you connect your account. Every submission is reviewed by a human. There are no ads, and there won’t be.

Who it’s for

If you make WordPress plugins. If you build sites. If you run an agency. If you speak at WordCamps or organize one. If you freelance. If you translate. If you answer questions in the forums. If you work on core. If you’re new and want to meet the people doing any of the above.

That’s the audience. It’s small enough to be specific, large enough to matter.

If you want to have a look

WPFolks is at wpfolks.org. It’s free to sign up. If you’ve got a WordPress.org account, we’ll pull your plugins and badges automatically so you’re not typing things twice.

If you find a bug, reply to the welcome email. I read every message. If you’ve got a plugin, post it. If you’ve got an idea someone should build, post that too.

Thanks for reading. See you there.