Category Archives: Dashboards

Hari Shanker R 5:38 pm on September 12, 2024
Tags: dashboards, project   

WordPress Contribution Health Dashboards: An Experiment

In open sourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. projects like WordPress, tracking progress through data is essential for informed decision-making, spotting trends, and improving efficiency. At 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 2023, @matt emphasized the need for ‘project health dashboards,’ sparking the creation of a working group that includes @courane01, @nao, @peiraisotta, @harishanker (myself), and others. Over the past year, we’ve worked to bring this vision to life. Today, @courane01 and I are excited to announce experimental health dashboards for the Make/WordPress CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress., Community, and Training Teams, along with an overview of WordPress 6.6 release statistics. These dashboards, compiled manually using tools like Bitergia Analytics, offer a snapshot of team performance.

This project, still experimental, seeks community feedback to refine and expand dashboarding efforts across more teams. You can check out the individual dashboards by following these links:

Core Team Dashboard
Community Team Dashboard
Training Team Dashboard
WordPress 6.6 Statistics

Key Insights from the Experiment

Core Team

Line chart showing newly attracted developers and contributors getting inactive in core. The numbers have mostly skewed in favor of newly attracted developers, but there has been a recent spike in contributors leaving.
Based on 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/ and wordpress_develop 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. The numbers have mostly skewed in favor of newly attracted developers, but there has been a recent spike in contributors leaving.
  • While the WordPress project has always had a good balance between new and inactive contributors, there is a clear increase in the number of contributors going inactive in 2024, as shown in our research.
  • The WordPress 6.6 dashboard shows a steady number of contributors (637), with 38% being new. In comparison, version 6.5 had 703 contributors, one of the largest recent releases.
  • Core Team contributions happen in spikes around WordPress releases.
  • Contributions are predominately by companies like Automattic, Yoast, GoDaddy, and 10up, with a reliance on sponsored contributors.
  • Core GitHub repositories maintain strong close/merge rates, but there’s a downward trend projected for 2024.
  • Contributor distribution is strong, with sponsored contributors supporting a majority of contributions. The team is currently focused on shipping version 6.7 and launching Gutenberg Phase 3.
Check out the Core Team Dashboard
WordPress 6.6 Statistics

Training Team

Bar and line Chart showing Learn WordPress Course users and enrollment rate. As of August 2024, almost 60% of users visiting course content have enrolled in courses.
Chart showing Learn WordPress Course users and enrollment rate. As of August 2024, almost 60% of users visiting course content have enrolled in courses. Note that course viewers has also gone up.
  • The Training Team has exceeded its projected goals, by achieving a video retention rate of 50% for their video content. and and a course enrollment rate of almost 60%.
  • Their Learning Pathways project has met its contribution goals, with high enrollment and course completion rates, as well as 90% learner satisfaction.
  • The team relies on GitHub for project management, with high engagement among contributors.
  • A high number of casual contributors indicates a need for more regular and 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. to ensure long-term team health.
  • The team seeks contributors for its learning pathways project and online workshop presenters.
Check out the Training Team Dashboard

Community Team

Line charts showing event counts, unique attendee counts, and all attendee counts from 2014 through 2024 for WordPress Events. Theese events peaked in 2018-2019 with 143-142 events, but the numbers went down in the COVID years, and have only marginally picked up.
Post-COVID, we are seeing a minor increase in event, unique attendee, and all attendee count, but we are nowhere close to 2019 (pre-COVID) levels.
  • The Community Team is close to achieving its projected goal of 45% new attendee participation, with a 44.76% rate.
  • Post-COVID, the number of WordPress events has dipped but is showing improvement.
  • The recent shift to GitHub for project management has resulted in high engagement.
  • To meet ambitious goals, the team needs more program and event supporters and community event hosts.
Check out the Community Team Dashboard

The Process

We began this project by engaging with the WordPress community and gathering valuable feedback, which revealed the need for an automated dashboard tool. After extensive research, we selected Bitergia Analytics for its open-source nature and potential for self-hosting, ensuring digital sovereignty for the WordPress community. Bitergia offers customizable dashboards, GDPR compliance, and integrates with tools like GitGit Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. Git is easy to learn and has a tiny footprint with lightning fast performance. Most modern plugin and theme development is being done with this version control system. https://git-scm.com/., GitHub, IRC, SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/., Docker Hub, and more. Our Bitergia dashboard, linked to the WordPress GitHub repository, is currently private with access granted to @courane01, @harishanker, @peiraisotta, and @nao. This service operates under a basic plan sponsored by Automattic, costing €1000/month.

Informed by insights from Bitergia Analytics, @courane01, @harishanker, and @peiraisotta hosted project health hangouts in May to gather further feedback from the broader WordPress community. Based on that input, we developed pilot dashboards for WordPress Core, Community, and Training teams, which rely heavily on metrics for their work. However, Bitergia Analytics doesn’t currently support our tools such as HelpScout, Figma, TracTrac Trac is the place where contributors create issues for bugs or feature requests much like GitHub.https://core.trac.wordpress.org/., SVNSVN Apache Subversion (often abbreviated SVN, after its command name svn) is a software versioning and revision control system. Software developers use Subversion to maintain current and historical versions of files such as source code, web pages, and documentation. Its goal is to be a mostly compatible successor to the widely used Concurrent Versions System (CVS). WordPress core and the wordpress.org released code are all centrally managed through SVN. https://subversion.apache.org/., and GlotPress. To bridge this gap, we used alternative data sources like the WordPress 6.6 props list and contributor team data from the Community and Training teams to prepare these dashboards, alongside Bitergia Analytics.

What’s Next?

These dashboards were created as an experiment to assess their usefulness. Manually compiling the data is time-consuming and may not be sustainable. @courane01 and I invested significant effort into preparing them. If they prove valuable, we hope to encourage other Make/Teams to create their own and explore a project-wide dashboard, though this could be resource-intensive. Positive feedback would support continued development, including building custom tools or upgrading to a premium Bitergia plan for deeper data insights to support contributor teams.

Request for Feedback

Thank you for reviewing this project! Our long-term goal is to build automated, live dashboards for WordPress. We appreciate your feedback on the following questions as we attempt to refine our work:

  • Are these team metrics useful?
  • Should we consider additional metrics?
  • Should we continue creating similar dashboards in the future?
  • Can we automate this process, and if so, how? (We’re considering Bitergia.)
  • Are you interested in helping develop this further?

Please share your thoughts in the comments on or before October 7, 2024.

This post-was co-written by: @courane01 and @harishanker with inputs from @nao @cbringmann and @georglink

The following individuals have directly contributed to this project: @courane01 @harishanker @nao @peiraisotta @georglink. Big thanks to @audrasjb @cbringmann @desrosj @jorbin @jeffpaul @piyopiyofox @zoonini @west7 for their support, input, and feedback.

For further insights and to follow the development of this initiative, check out these resources:

#dashboards #project

+make.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//core +make.wordpress.org/community +make.wordpress.org/training +make.wordpress.org/updates +make.wordpress.org/sustainability