New lead developers: Helen and Dion

I’m pleased to announce that Dion Hulse (@dd32) and Helen Hou-Sandí (@helen) are now lead developers of the WordPress project.

The two are already highly respected leaders in the community. Dion has architected some of the most important code in WordPress over the years. He started by building the pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party updater way back in 2007, helped lay the foundations of custom post types and taxonomies, and more recently, designed and implemented automatic updates. He has essentially been one of coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.’s main architects for years, all while providing advice, code review to newcomers (myself included, long ago).

Helen’s tremendous impact on the project is surely known to all of you. She champions the project’s philosophies, she’s been a key leader on dozens of features large and small, including the media UIUI User interface, CSSCSS Cascading Style Sheets. architecture, and the jam-packed WordPress 4.0 release. Her strong engineering skills are backed by her natural leadership, sound judgement for user experience design, and the mentorship of countless contributors.

Please join me in congratulating Helen and Dion!