WordPress 6.3 Planning Proposal & Call for Volunteers

After the successful launch of WordPress 6.2, it’s time to start planning for WordPress 6.3, and for WordPress 6.4’s women and non-binary-led release. In preparation, this post includes WordPress 6.3 proposed target dates and a call for its release squad.

The timeline for the second release of 2023 takes into consideration this year’s two remaining flagship events – 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 in early June and WordCamp US and the Community Summit in late August. To avoid having major milestones (Beta1, RC1) conflictconflict A conflict occurs when a patch changes code that was modified after the patch was created. These patches are considered stale, and will require a refresh of the changes before it can be applied, or the conflicts will need to be resolved. with these events, this proposal suggests fitting the release process, from Beta1 to the final release, in the ten-week window between both events.

According to the schedule proposed below and the 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/ release cadence, WordPress 6.3 would include up to Gutenberg 16.1 for a total of 10 Gutenberg releases.

Proposed WordPress 6.3 Schedule

MilestoneDate
Alpha (trunktrunk A directory in Subversion containing the latest development code in preparation for the next major release cycle. If you are running "trunk", then you are on the latest revision. open for 6.3 release)March 9, 2023
BetaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. 1June 27, 2023
Beta 2July 3, 2023*
Beta 3July 11, 2023
Release Candidaterelease candidate One of the final stages in the version release cycle, this version signals the potential to be a final release to the public. Also see alpha (beta). 1July 18, 2023
Release Candidate 2July 25, 2023
Release Candidate 3August 1, 2023
Dry RunAugust 7, 2023
WordPress 6.3 General ReleaseAugust 8, 2023

*July 4th is the US Independence Day. Although the release schedule can’t adapt to all holidays worldwide, planning a beta release on that day would likely have a low turn of participants on July 4th, given the significant contributor presence in the US.

Please leave your feedback about the schedule in the comments by April 30th.

Release Leads call for volunteers

  • Release Coordinator: TBD
  • CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. Tech Lead: TBD
  • Editor Tech Lead:  TBD
  • Core Triagetriage The act of evaluating and sorting bug reports, in order to decide priority, severity, and other factors. Lead: TBD
  • Editor Triage Lead: TBD
  • Documentation Lead: TBD
  • Marketing & Communications Lead: TBD
  • Test Lead: TBD
  • Design Lead: TBD
  • Performance Lead: TBD

The Performance Lead was first tried as an experiment in WordPress 6.2. Although feedback collection for the WordPress 6.2 release process is still open, positive sentiment around the experiment in the #6-2-release-leads Slack channel suggests repeating the role in 6.3.

All release decisions will ultimately be this release team’s to make and communicate while gathering input from the community.

Join The Squad… or learn from them!

If you are interested in participating in 6.3’s release squad, please show interest in the comments below. Most roles are better shared among more than one person to distribute the responsibilities.

Folks interested in joining the upcoming all-women and non-binary release squad in 6.4 will work with a mentor. While this mentorship is not tied to the 6.3 release squad, nor do mentors need to volunteer in this release, shadowing the 6.3 release process is also recommended preparation for those being part of the following release.


Thanks to @cbringmann, @francina, for the peer review and feedback

#6-3 #planning