Today officially marks 6 full years since my first changeset to the WordPress open source project as a committer.

In the context of the WordPress project, a committer is a contributor with the ability to modify the main WordPress source repository. Since 2004, roughly 115 people have been granted commit status for WordPress Core and 105 have made at least 1 commit.

If you’re interested in learning more, I recommend reading The Qualities of a great WordPress contributor by WordPress Lead Developer Andrew Nacin. Though this post was written in 2014 (and his blog still has not been updated since 2015), a lot of the qualities, responsibilities, and duties of a committer still hold true.

Being a committer is a responsibility that I take very seriously. With WordPress powering roughly 43% of the Internet (and increasing again), it’s a truly humbling obligation to be granted.

A Quarter Century of Contributing

While compiling the numbers for this post, I realized that recently I also crossed a quarter century as a contributor. That may think that is strange and impossible since WordPress is only 21 years old. But think dog years, not the Gregorian calendar.

If each major version of WordPress is a “year”, WordPress 6.7 released earlier this month marked my 25th credited major version of WordPress marking a quarter century. 🎉

Commits by the numbers (2023-2024)

Here are some commit stats from November 30, 2023 through November 29, 2024:

• 257 total commits
• 130 commits to trunk
• 5 version bumps
• 9 reverts
• 4 “unprops”
• 1 tags created
• 280 total props given out in my commits
• 162 unique contributors given props in my commits
• Of those 162 contributors, 27 were receiving props for the first time

Roughly grouped, here are my commits organized by component (* designates a component that I help maintain):

• Build/Test Tools: 186*
• Bundled Themes: 15*
• Coding Standards: 8 (focus, not a component)
• Customizer: 1
• Database: 1
• Docs: 2 (focus, not a component)
• Editor: 7
• Emoji: 1
• External Libraries: 6*
• Feeds: 2
• General: 5*
• i18n: 6
• Interactivity API: 1
• Login: 1
• Media: 3*
• Menus: 1
• Options, Meta APIs: 2
• Plugins: 2
• Taxonomy: 1
• Upgrade/Install: 1*
• Upload: 1

Add it up: All Six Years

Here are stats for all six years of being a WordPress Core Committer (November 30, 2018 through today):

• 2,185 total commits
• 1,071 commits to trunk
• 247 version bumps
• 147 version tags created
• 3 branches created
• 37 reverts
• 21 “unprops”
• 7 commits with hidden song lyrics
• 4,187 total props given out in my commits
• 689 unique contributors given props in my commits

Thank YOU!

Being a WordPress committer would not be as exciting and fulfilling without all of the contributions from the fellow community members who take the time to help maintain this free piece of software in a multitude of ways. Thank you to each and every one of you! ❤️

Previous Commit-iversaries

Two, Three/Four/Five.

Featured image credit: CC0 licensed photo by mdburnette from the WordPress Photo Directory.