A Year in Core – 2022

Happy new year everyone! Here’s some aggregate data for 2022 about WordPress CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. contribution on TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress..

Please note: these data only include code contributions to WordPress codebase, and it does not include contributions on GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ repositories like GutenbergGutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/.

The raw data for this post are available on this public spreadsheet. You might find that much easier to read if you have low vision or colorblindness; the graphics below are a snapshot pulled together to include as much information as possible in this blogpost, but they are hard to make accessible to everyone.

You can also compare these stats with last year’s data.

Last note: all the graphics below link to to a new tab to display them in full size.

General Trac overview

In 2022, the WordPress Core team shipped 2597 commits (1852 in 2021). 2656 tickets were opened, 2413 tickets were closed, and 353 were reopened.

Also, 988 people contributed to WordPress source code using Trac (832 in 2021), and 398 people made their very first contribution to WordPress Core ♥️ (305 in 2021).

	January	February	March	April	May	June	July	August	September	October	November	December	Total
Commits	229	156	230	279	133	172	183	235	320	374	182	104	2597
Tickets closed	214	217	187	190	194	146	220	148	269	278	240	110	2413
Tickets reopened	55	46	22	23	34	27	19	20	23	33	40	11	353
Tickets created	297	252	230	132	235	230	194	171	218	231	299	167	2656
New contributors	18	32	20	37	15	18	69	31	68	43	43	4	398
Contributors	115	122	168	200	110	105	196	211	327	237	162	56	988

Check out the Trac timeline in the graph below:

Here’s how many props and new contributors the Core project had per month. The most prolific month was September, followed by October, August and July, during the WordPress 6.1 development cycle. March and April were also prolific months (WP 6.0 development cycle).

Components activity

How did 2022’s commits break out by Core Component?

The most prolific components were:

• Build/Test Tools with 366 commits (17% of all listed commits)
• Docs with 297 commits (14% of all listed commits)
• Editor with 207 commits (10% of all listed commits)
• Coding Standards with 145 commits (7% of all listed commits) and Code Modernization (which is not an official component) with 135 commits (6% of all listed commits)
• Bundled Themes with 128 commits (6% of all listed commits)
• Then comes Media, Administration, REST APIREST API The REST API is an acronym for the RESTful Application Program Interface (API) that uses HTTP requests to GET, PUT, POST and DELETE data. It is how the front end of an application (think “phone app” or “website”) can communicate with the data store (think “database” or “file system”) https://developer.wordpress.org/rest-api/., Themes, General, Upgrade/Install, Help/About, Internationalization, Posts/Post Types, Query and Users. The other components each had fewer than 30 commits this year.

Contributors data retrieved from WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ profiles

The data below comes from matching contributors’ usernames, as mentioned in Trac props, with their profiles on WordPress.org.

One caveat: this ignores usernames that did not match a profile on dotorg, plus any that had blank or unusable country/company information (“The Universe” or “Unicorn land” are not known countries 🙂).

Contributions by country

The next graph shows the number of props received by country. The top eight countries, based on the number of props received, are these:

• United States with 1255 contributions (1142 in 2021)
• Russia with 1152 contributions (227 in 2021)
• France with 739 contributions (266 in 2021)
• Australia with 386 contributions (211 in 2021)
• India with 317 contributions (219 in 2021)
• Netherlands with 225 contributions
• United Kingdom with 216 contributions (112 in 2021)
• Sweden with 182 contributions (102 in 2021)

Contributors (people) by country

In 2022, people from at least 57 countries contributed to WordPress Core (56 countries in 2021).

Here is the top eight countries by number of contributors:

• United States with 152 people (155 in 2021)
• India with 77 people (58 in 2021)
• Bangladesh with 43 people (only 13 in 2021)
• United Kingdom with 38 people (34 in 2021)
• Germany with 25 people (23 in 2021)
• Netherlands with 23 people (20 in 2021)
• France with 22 people (26 in 2021)
• Canada with 17 people (16 in 2021)
• Italy with 13 people (15 in 2021)

Contributions by company

In 2022, people from at least 229 companies contributed to WP Core.

These companies (well, their employees) each contributed to more than 100 commits:

• Yoast with 1452 contributions (379 in 2021)
• Automattic with 866 contributions (785 in 2021)
• Whodunit with 676 contributions (215 in 2021)
• 10up with 501 contributions (30 in 2021)
• Bluehost with 226 contributions (146 in 2021)
• Advies en zo with 220 contributions (191 in 2021)
• Spacedmonkey with 132 contributions (38 in 2021)
• Google with 130 contributions (87 in 2021)
• Dream Encode with 124 contributions (20 in 2021)
• Human Made with 126 contributions (131 in 2021)
• Awesome Motive with 122 contributions (29 in 2021)

Contributors (people) by company

The graph below is also interesting, because it shows that a huge number of companies have only one contributor—or a very few contributors. The exceptions are Automattic, with 88 core contributorsCore Contributors Core contributors are those who have worked on a release of WordPress, by creating the functions or finding and patching bugs. These contributions are done through Trac. https://core.trac.wordpress.org. on Trac in 2022, 10up with 38 contributors, Yoast (18 contributors), WPDeveloper (15 contributors), Multidots (14 contributors), and rtCamp (10 contributors). Only these 6 companies had more than 10 people credited on Trac in 2022.

What did 2022 hold for Core Committers?

32 Core Committers committed code to the WordPress SVNSVN Subversion, the popular version control system (VCS) by the Apache project, used by WordPress to manage changes to its codebase. repository this year (33 in 2021):

@sergeybiryukov (755), @audrasjb (414), @peterwilsoncc (126), @desrosj (125), @davidbaumwald (87), @gziolo (72), @spacedmonkey (53), @hellofromtonya (48), @johnbillion (45), @joedolson (31), @azaozz (21), @jorgefilipecosta (19), @ryelle (15), @flixos90 (12), @adamsilverstein (10), @clorith (10), @noisysocks (9), @ocean90 (7), @antpb (6), @bernhard-reiter (6), @jorbin (5), @timothyblynjacobs (4), @swissspidy (4), @jffng (4), @westonruter (3), @pento (2), @helen (2), @youknowriad (2), @kadamwhite (1), @joemcgill (1), @mcsf (1), and @mikeschroder (1).

Of the 1901 commits, 755 (39%) were made by people working at Yoast, 414 (21%) from people working at Whodunit, 199 (10%) from employees of Automattic, followed by 10up (128 commits) and Bluehost (125 commits).

Automattic is the only company with more than 10 active Core Committers. Google has 4 people allowed to commit code to WordPress, followed by 10up and Human Made with 2 Core Committers.

Worth noting that 14 of the 32 active committers come from the US, which represents 43% of the Core Committers squad. Australia comes second with 3 committers and Portugal third with 2 committers.

More than 39% of the commits where handled by committers located in Russia, 21% by committers located in France, and 18% by committers located in the US.

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Many thanks to @sabernhardt for his help to collect the 2022 data and to proofread this recap.

#contributions, #contributors, #team-update, #week-in-core, #year-in-core