WordPress 6.3 « Lionel » was released on August 8, 2023. This version is named « Lionel », after the American jazzer Lionel Hampton.
I was involved in this release as Triage Lead and as a core committer. It was a pleasure to work with the release squad. A big thank you to all the talented people who worked hard to put together WP 6.3 ❤️
As for previous releases, let’s have a look on a few stats about this release.
In the past, I already published some contributions stats for versions 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, 5.7, 5.9, 6.0, 6.1 and 6.2. I did it again for WP 6.3, so we can have an eye on the relative « influence » of countries and companies on WordPress Core.
Before diving into WordPress 6.3 Core contributions stats, I wanted to share a few disclaimers, for better context:
- These stats were generated after the last Release Candidate of WP 6.3. Thanks to Jon who collected the props list for the release squad.
- These statistics only relate to Core contributions (= props gained for source code contributions) of WordPress. There is a lot of other types of contributions, not listed here: marketing, communication, translation, testing…
- To get these stats, I parsed the WordPress.org profile page of each contributor to get some public informations about them: country, employer, and wether they already contributed to WordPress Core or not.
- It includes both Core contributions on Trac and Gutenberg pull requests on GitHub.
- Those stats are based on what’s declared in each contributors’s wp.org profile. Users with empty profile info are not taken into account.
Country ranking by number of contributions
It’s interesting to see how much WordPress is a worldwide project. Contributions come from all over the planet ♥️
USA is still number one by far with 863 contributions, United Kingdom comes 2nd with 360 contributions. Russia and France follows with 346 and 320 contributions each, and India and Australia with 291 and 266 props.
Country ranking by number of contributors
Still, contributions are not everything. Let’s talk about contributors. Instead of counting contributions, we can count the individuals who worked on this release (= number of people credited in Trac tickets or GitHub PRs)… and we have the following results :
USA is still on the top of the game with 102 people. India has 68 and Bangladesh has 48.
These countries are followed by France and United Kingdom with 19 contributors each.
In conclusion, USA still dominates the stats by number of independent contributors, and by number of contributions (props count). Bangladesh and India have a great number of people involved, but not so much contribution.
Company ranking by contributions
Automattic is still the most prolific company with employees credited in no less than 1718 contributions (by 83 contributors), and is followed by plugin editor Yoast with 499 contributions (by 6 contributors) and Whodunit French agency (298 contributions by 6 people). Next, we have the international WP agencies 10up (290 contributions by 16 people), XWP (180 contributions), hosting companies like GoDaddy (173 contributions) and Google with 161 contributions.
Worth noting that major stakeholders can still be categorized in three sorts of companies: agencies, plugins/themes editors and hosting companies. And of course, well… Automattic 😜
In the graphic below, you’ll see all the company credited in WordPress 6.3 and the number of contributions of their employees.
Company ranking by contributors
Of the 186 identified companies that contributed to WordPress 6.3, Automattic had by far the largest number of contributors, with 83 people involved. 10up is the second biggest company in terms of contributors, with 16 people. WPDeveloper comes third with 11 people. AuthLab and rtCamp come fourth with 10 people.
Individual ranking – WordPress 6.3
Here is the top 30 of WordPress 6.3 contributors. You can also checkout the full table on this spreadsheet.
| # | Username | Contributions | Country | Company |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | sergeybiryukov | 296 | Russia | Yoast |
| 2 | audrasjb | 293 | France | Whodunit |
| 3 | spacedmonkey | 175 | United Kingdom | XWP |
| 4 | mamaduka | 143 | Georgia | GoDaddy |
| 5 | costdev | 142 | NC | NC |
| 6 | mukesh27 | 119 | India | 10up |
| 7 | isabel_brison | 110 | NC | Automattic |
| 8 | ramonopoly | 110 | NC | NC |
| 9 | andrewserong | 97 | Australia | Automattic |
| 10 | wildworks | 88 | Japan | NC |
| 11 | youknowriad | 87 | Algeria | Automattic |
| 12 | scruffian | 87 | NC | Automattic |
| 13 | ntsekouras | 84 | Greece | Automattic |
| 14 | flixos90 | 81 | United States | |
| 15 | peterwilsoncc | 80 | Australia | 10up |
| 16 | poena | 78 | Sweden | Yoast |
| 17 | get_dave | 75 | United Kingdom | Automattic |
| 18 | sabernhardt | 74 | United States | NC |
| 19 | afercia | 71 | Italy | Yoast |
| 20 | tyxla | 70 | Bulgaria | Automattic |
| 21 | joedolson | 69 | United States | Accessible WD |
| 22 | aaronrobertshaw | 67 | NC | Automattic |
| 23 | richtabor | 66 | United States | Automattic |
| 24 | jameskoster | 56 | United Kingdom | Automattic |
| 25 | hellofromtonya | 56 | United States | Automattic |
| 26 | aristath | 51 | Greece | Yoast |
| 27 | joemcgill | 49 | United States | 10up |
| 28 | mciampini | 48 | NC | Automattic |
| 29 | talldanwp | 47 | Australia | Automattic |
| 30 | ellatrix | 47 | NC | NC |
Core committers stats
Core Committers are developers who have commit access to the WordPress codebase. This represents about 50 people, but not all committers are currently active.
Number of commits by country
Number of committers by country
Number of commits by company
Number of committers by company
Thank you to everyone who helped
to release WordPress 6.3.
Big or small, each of the above company contributes
to the Five for the future initiative 💙
I hope you liked that post! Comments & shares are welcome 😍
You can also buy me a beer or a coffee if you want 🍻☕️
Feel free to reuse any graphic or data used in this post, without any limitation. The raw data are available on this spreadsheet.
Contact me if you have any question.
