John Blackbourn is leading WordPress 4.1 (and announcing new committers!)

I’m pleased to share John Blackbourn (@johnbillion) is the release leadRelease Lead The community member ultimately responsible for the Release. for WordPress 4.1. But please hold your applause until the end, I have a few announcements to get through!

WordPress 4.1 will be kicking off at WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. Europe this weekend. As noted yesterday, the first meeting will be at 1400 UTC on Monday, September 29.

You’ve probably seen John in action over the years (his first contribution was more than seven years ago). I’ll also add it’s pretty awesome that @simonwheatley and @s1m0nd of Code for the People (a six-person shop) jumped at the chance to donate a large chunk of John’s time through the end of the year back to the WordPress project. (See also this post for more on the release lead role.)

New committers for WordPress 4.1

As many of you know, the lead developers review and appoint new committers to serve each release cycle, often to work on a particular component or feature. This guest commit access comes up for review after each release and can be renewed. I in particular work closely with every guest committercommitter A developer with commit access. WordPress has five lead developers and four permanent core developers with commit access. Additionally, the project usually has a few guest or component committers - a developer receiving commit access, generally for a single release cycle (sometimes renewed) and/or for a specific component., providing feedback.

I’m pleased to announce our largest guest committer class ever: Gary Pendergast (@pento), Boone B. Gorges (@boonebgorges), Konstantin Kovshenin (@kovshenin), Aaron Jorbin (@jorbin), and Jeremy Felt (@jeremyfelt).

Konstantin and Gary both enjoy diving into internals and getting their hands dirty with tough bugs and regressions. Jeremy will be continuing to push multisitemultisite Used to describe a WordPress installation with a network of multiple blogs, grouped by sites. This installation type has shared users tables, and creates separate database tables for each blog (wp_posts becomes wp_0_posts). See also network, blog, site forward. Jorbin will be focusing on testing and tooling. Boone has been working on a set of great improvements to tax, date, and metaMeta Meta is a term that refers to the inside workings of a group. For us, this is the team that works on internal WordPress sites like WordCamp Central and Make WordPress. queries, with test coverage to come with it.

These five should be strangers to no one — they’ve all been around the community for years, and not only are they top-notch contributors who embody the project, but they’re generally just really good people.

This will also be John Blackbourn’s third release as a guest committer. I’d also like to welcome back Ian Stewart (@iandstewart), who previously was a committer during the development of Twenty Eleven, and will be back to take the commit reins for the next default theme, Twenty Fifteen.

Scott Taylor (@wonderboymusic) was on fire during 4.0, especially if this terrific post is any testament, continuing a great run. Scott’s WP origin story is pretty great — right as he was getting ready to leave the WordCamp San Francisco 2011 after-party, @koop convinced him to stick around a little longer. We were introduced, and not long after (from the party) his first patchpatch A special text file that describes changes to code, by identifying the files and lines which are added, removed, and altered. It may also be referred to as a diff. A patch can be applied to a codebase for testing. got committed. A thousand contributions later that have made an indelible impact, Scott is now a permanent WordPress committer. We hope to have him around for a long time.

About a year ago Drew Jaynes (@DrewAPicture) was given commit access to lead the hook documentation effort. This was hugely successful. After the effort was complete, Drew’s role evolved into maintaining all inline docsinline docs (phpdoc, docblock, xref), which has just been wonderful. We appreciate his attention to detail and his dedication to this never-ending effort. Drew is now a permanent committer.

Congratulations to John, Drew, Scott, Gary, Konstantin, Jeremy, Jorbin, Ian, and Boone!

#4-1, #commit, #release-lead