A Year in Core – 2023

Happy new year, everyone! Here’s some aggregate data for 2023 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, not 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 such as 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 and data from 2021.
• All the links for the graphics below open a new tab to display them in full size.

General Trac overview

In 2023, the WordPress Core team shipped 2211 commits (2597 in 2022). 2751 tickets were opened, 2545 tickets were closed, and 365 were reopened.

Also, 1079 people contributed to WordPress source code using Trac (988 in 2022), and 472 people made their very first contribution to WordPress Core ♥️ (398 in 2022).

	January	February	March	April	May	June	July	August	September	October	November	December	Total
Commits	148	265	179	84	174	246	209	173	250	288	108	87	2211
Tickets closed	181	297	218	156	179	259	211	277	239	268	148	112	2545
Tickets reopened	25	36	36	19	25	40	42	29	35	40	28	10	365
Tickets created	185	234	208	188	208	255	256	310	250	270	212	175	2751
New contributors	18	91	23	18	25	74	51	31	75	46	12	8	472
Contributors	137	295	155	87	150	279	217	182	295	249	111	93	1079

Check out the Trac timeline in the graphs below:

Here’s how many props and new contributors the Core project had per month. The most prolific months were February and September with 295 contributors each, followed by June and October. 42 of the new contributors received their first props on a commit related to the Twenty Twenty-Four theme.

Components activity

How did 2023’s commits break out by Core Component?

The most prolific components were:

• Editor with 284 commits (12.8% of all listed commits)
• Build/Test Tools with 265 commits (12% of all listed commits)
• Docs with 188 commits (8.5% of all listed commits)
• Coding Standards with 154 commits (7% of all listed commits)
• Bundled Themes with 130 commits (5.9% of all listed commits)
• Then came Media, Help/About, Code Modernization (which is not an official component), Themes, Administration, General, HTMLHTML HyperText Markup Language. The semantic scripting language primarily used for outputting content in web browsers. APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways., Internationalization, 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/. and Upgrade/Install. 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 2062 contributions (1255 in 2022)
• Russia with 795 contributions (1152 in 2022)
• India with 683 contributions (317 in 2022)
• France with 680 contributions (739 in 2022)
• Australia with 611 contributions (386 in 2022)
• United Kingdom with 471 contributions (216 in 2022)
• Ireland with 403 contributions
• Bangladesh with 340 contributions (145 in 2022)

Contributors (people) by country

In 2023, people from at least 62 countries contributed to WordPress Core (57 countries in 2022).

Here are the top eight countries by number of contributors:

• United States with 164 people (152 in 2022)
• Bangladesh with 105 people (only 43 in 2022)
• India with 93 people (77 in 2022)
• United Kingdom with 31 people (38 in 2022)
• France with 30 people (22 in 2022)
• Canada with 25 people (17 in 2022)
• Germany with 21 people (25 in 2022)
• Netherlands with 21 people (23 in 2022)
• Spain with 19 people (12 in 2022)

Contributions by company

In 2023, people from at least 286 companies contributed to WP Core.

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

• Automattic with 1770 contributions (866 in 2022)
• Yoast with 985 contributions (1452 in 2022)
• 10up with 904 contributions (501 in 2022)
• Whodunit with 561 contributions (676 in 2022)
• Google with 404 contributions (130 in 2022)
• Bluehost with 238 contributions (226 in 2022)
• XWP with 224 contributions (14 in 2022)
• Human Made with 177 contributions (126 in 2022)
• Advies en zo with 143 contributions (220 in 2022)
• Dream Encode with 128 contributions (124 in 2022)
• Emilia Capital with 123 contributions
• Accessible WD with 120 contributions (53 in 2022)
• GoDaddy with 111 contributions (42 in 2022)

Contributors (people) by company

A huge number of companies have only one contributor—or very few contributors. The exceptions are Automattic, with 108 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 2023, WPDeveloper (39 contributors), 10up with 25 contributors, AuthLab (21 contributors), rtCamp (17 contributors), Awsm (12 contributors), Human Made (12 contributors), Multidots (12 contributors), and Yoast (10 contributors). Only these 9 companies had at least 10 people credited on Trac in 2023.

What did 2022 hold for Core Committers?

39 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 (32 in 2022):

@sergeybiryukov (552), @audrasjb (413), @desrosj (148), @hellofromtonya (134), @joedolson (93), @isabel_brison (88), @spacedmonkey (88), @flixos90 (87), @peterwilsoncc (82), @davidbaumwald (77), @bernhard-reiter (67), @jorbin (44), @johnbillion (43), @joemcgill (39), @swissspidy (30), @azaozz (27), @costdev (25), @westonruter (25), @karmatosed (24), @gziolo (22), @oandregal (15), @ryelle (15), @adamsilverstein (9), @danielbachhuber (9), @jorgefilipecosta (8), @zieladam (7), @kadamwhite (6), @youknowriad (6), @antpb (4), @drewapicture (4), @mikeschroder (4), @afercia (3), @timothyblynjacobs (3), @clorith (2), @dd32 (2), @helen (2), @ocean90 (2), @johnjamesjacoby (1), and @whyisjake (1).

Of the 2211 commits, 555 (25%) were made by people working at Yoast, 413 (19%) from people working at Whodunit, 399 (18%) from employees of Automattic, followed by Google (151 commits), Bluehost (148 commits) and 10up (123 commits).

Automattic is the only company with more than 10 active Core Committers, and 12 of them committed code in 2023. Google has 4 people allowed to commit code to WordPress, followed by 10up with 3 Core Committers.

Worth noting that 15 of the 39 active committers come from the US, which represents 38% of the Core Committers squad. Australia, Canada, Italy, Poland and United Kingdom each had 2 committers.

More than 30% of the commits were handled by committers located in the United States, 26% by committers located in Russia, and 19% by committers located in France.

Sponsorship

In 2023, 21.6% of the contributors and 23.1% of the committers indicated that a company sponsors their contributions.

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Many thanks to @audrasjb for help collecting the 2023 data and for adding several graphics.

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