At WordCamp 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. US 2025, Core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. Committers in attendance (including emeritus) gathered for a brief informal meeting. A few additional contributors with a heavy focus on Core were also invited.
There was no formal agenda, but a few goals for the meeting were:
- Allow newer committers to meet more senior ones.
- Allow anyone to raise questions, concerns, or suggestions that have been on their minds.
- Just spend some time together chatting and getting to know each other.
Below are some brief notes from the discussions that happened following Chatham House Rule.
Attendees: @marybaum, @aaroncampbell, @adamsilverstein, @nerrad, @flixos90, @jeffpaul, @davidbaumwald, @whyisjake, @jjj, @ryelle, @dmsnell, @ellatrix, @matt, @bpayton, @karmatosed, @westonruter, @helen, @priethor, @kadamwhite, @joemcgill, @timothyblynjacobs, @annezazu, @jorbin
Getting New Contributors and Committers
The first topic raised was that the majority of committers are long term contributors and in order to ensure the health of the project, it is necessary ensure new contributors are rising up and taking on additional responsibilities.
It was noted that multiple contributors had a good experience with Google Summer of Code (GSoC) both as mentors and participants. WordPress hasn’t participated for a few years since there is a burden to organzing it. However, this group felt that it is worth re-evaluating and may be worth participating again in 2026.
Mentorship is also very important in helping new contributors take on additional responsibilities, though this mentorship can feel like a lot of work and is often hidden work. It’s hard to show a measurable ROI. Using learn.wordpress.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/ to share process was identified as one way to scale mentorship. Instead of being 1:1, it can be 1:many. Additionally, using cohorts allows more contributors to benefit from mentorship.
It was also pointed out that there is an excitement about contributing that can be contagious. It’s important to get people excited about solving problems since seeing people excited can make more people excited. It’s also important to make space for more contributors and remember that taking a step back for newer contributors to pick up those responsibilities doesn’t need to mean taking a step out.
WordPress Coding Standards The Accessibility, PHP, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, etc. coding standards as published in the WordPress Coding Standards Handbook.
May also refer to The collection of PHP_CodeSniffer rules (sniffs) used to format and validate PHP code developed for WordPress according to the PHP coding standards. in Core.
It was highlighted that at times the current WPCS A public benefit corporation and a subsidiary of the WordPress Foundation, established in 2016. can be a challenge rather than actually helpful. Some current rules are outdated and may not be as helpful as they were thought to be when originally added to WordPress. Additionally, all the ignores that these inspire leads to Core code feeling odd. These rules include (but are not limited to):
- Yoda Conditionals (Not viewed as necessary since we don’t allow assignment in conditionals)
- ZigZag alignment from aligning equal signs (Can lead to needing to change multiple unaffected lines of code Lines of code. This is sometimes used as a poor metric for developer productivity, but can also have other uses.)
- Pre-increment (Added based on a comment on php.net that doesn’t appear to be accurate)
The goal of coding standards is to make it easier to contribute. If individuals are finding it hard to conform to the existing rules, contributors are encouraged to ask for help in slack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/..
As it has been seven years since WordPress adopted coding standards, the recommendation from the group is to do a full audit of all the existing rules and then adjust the existing code to follow this new recommendation.
It was also suggested that the WPCS run on Pull Requests could be manually run instead of automatically enqueued so that new contributors aren’t immediately met with rejections.
How to make decisions when there is no clear decider
It’s often unclear who has the ability to make a specific decision and this can lead to bike shedding and/or an impasse. Several factors contribute to the decision-making paralysis. Committers often fear closing tickets that many people want, even if consensus among committers is that the functionality isn’t appropriate for core. The expansion of release squads from small, experienced teams to larger groups with varying experience levels has diluted clear ownership and decision-making authority.
One option to solve this that was discussed is to start using PHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 7.4 or higher RFC style voting amongst committers. It was also mentioned that if people are feeling like getting to a decision is difficult, or if someone is not fully confident in a decision, bringing attention to the topic in dev-chat or the #core slack channel can be helpful to gaining additional confidence.
Committers also reminded each other to give folks grace if they make a mistake. If a decision turns out to not be correct, we should empower people to speak up when they see negative impacts, and then work to fix or revert. However, it remains important to choose a direction, support it as a team, and adapt if the outcomes aren’t right.
Communication channels like slack, quarterly calls, and Hallway Hangouts were highlighted as valuable spaces for building trust and confidence in our decisions.
LLM Attribution and “AI Slop”
We are starting to see challenges with “AI Slop,” where contributions arrive as very large PRs that are difficult to review effectively. When this happens, contributors are encouraged to step back and discuss the underlying problem before moving ahead with code. In cases where a PR includes too many changes at once, it’s also reasonable to ask for the work to be split into smaller, more focused PRs to make review more manageable. And as always, there’s no expectation that every PR be reviewed, particularly when the work doesn’t align with agreed-upon priorities.
Props to @dmsnell and @jeffpaul for prepublication review and @jeffpaul and @jorbin for note-taking during the meeting.
#core-committer-meetings, #core-committers, #meeting
Reminder: The January meeting to Jan. 9th, 2025 at 13:00 UTC, due to Holiday season.