New committers for 4.3!

Please join me in welcoming three new guest committers for WordPress 4.3 — Ella Van Durpe (@ellatrix), Konstantin Obenland (@obenland), and Weston Ruter (@westonruter)!

Ella has been one of our very top contributors of late. She started with a front-end editor plugin, which parlayed into substantial coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. editor contributions, including inline image editing in 3.9, inline oEmbed previews and improved editor scrolling (“focus”) in 4.0, distraction-free writing (“focus v2”) in 4.1, and a few dozen other things I am sure I am missing (like this). She’s a powerhouse.

Obenland, well, is also wearing the release lead hat for 4.3. I said plenty of nice things about him there. 😄 While there’s no requirement for a release leadRelease Lead The community member ultimately responsible for the Release. to be a 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., a) it does help with housekeeping, and b) Konstantin has unquestionably earned this in his own right, regardless of his other role.

Weston has been essentially leading the customizerCustomizer Tool built into WordPress core that hooks into most modern themes. You can use it to preview and modify many of your site’s appearance settings. component since his work last year on bringing widgets into the customizer. His body of work there is nothing short of incredible and we’re lucky to have had him spearheading this important work.

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 — Aaron Jorbin and Jeremy Felt have both been renewed for 4.3.

We (well, I) neglected to announce that John Blackbourn (@johnbillion), Boone B. Gorges (@boonebgorges) and Gary Pendergast (@pento) were made full, permanent committers at the start of 4.2. John, Boone, and Gary all destroyed it in 4.1 (which is perhaps more obvious now that some of Gary’s work has been trickling out into the open).

Congrats all! 🎉

#4-3, #commit