WordPress 5.9 « Joséphine » was released on January 25th, 2022. This version is named « Joséphine », after the international jazz singer Joséphine Baker. She also had French nationality and entered the Panthéon last year, in 2021.
This release was a big one. It unveiled to the public the first implementation of the Full Site Editing features. The release was delayed from December 2021 to January 25th, 2022, to make sure it’s ready to go. I was honored to contribute to the release squad as Triage Lead, and I really enjoyed to work with all these talented people 💙
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 and 5.7. I did it again for WP 5.9, so we can have an eye on the relative “influence” of countries and companies on WordPress Core.
Before diving into WordPres 5.9 Core contributions stats, I wanted to share a few disclaimers, for better context:
- 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 informations are not taken into account.
WordPress 5.9 Overall Stats
624 people from at least 54 countries and 159 identified companies contributed to WordPress 5.9.
Worth noting that 192 people contributed to WordPress Core for the very first time! That’s around 30% of the total number of contributors.
The ratio of new contributors was lower than in previous releases like 5.5 or 5.6, but it’s higher than 5.7 and 5.8 and it still represents quite a good onboarding ratio for an open-source project.
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 ♥️
The USA is still number 1 by far with 1169 contributions, but Russia is behind with 330 contributions, still led by Sergey, the second person who made the most individual contributions on this version of WP. Australia follows, with 281 contributions overtaking the United Kingdom (243 contributions) and France (202 contributions). The Netherlands, Algeria, Canada, Greece, Georgia and Denmark are following.
Country ranking by number of contributors
If instead of counting contributions, we prefer to count the contributors (number of people credited in Trac tickets or GitHub issues), then we have the following results.
USA is still on the top of the game with 109 people. India is still second (since WordPress 4.7) with 43 contributors.
UK comes at the third place with 31 people, Canada and Germany both follow with 16 contributors, and France with 15 people credited.
It’s interesting to note that some countries are in the top ranking with only a few contributors. For example, Georgia and Denmark are in the top 10, but they both have only one contributor!
Company ranking by contributions
Automattic is still the most prolific company with employees credited in no less than 1787 contributions (by 83 contributors), and is followed by plugin editor Yoast with 454 contributions (by 11 contributors) and the Whodunit French agency (170 contributions). Next, we have Bluehost (165), a freelancer (!) named Advies en zo (161), Godaddy (156), and international WordPress agencies 10up (104), Human Made (85), Alley Interactive and XWP (56). Google is the next company with 52 contributions.
Worth noting that major stakeholders can still be categorized in three sorts of companies: agencies, plugins/themes editors and hosting companies. Well, and of course, Automattic 😜
In the graphic below, you’ll see all the company credited in WordPress 5.9 and the number of contributions of their employees.
Company ranking by contributors
Of the 159 identified companies that contributed to WordPress 5.9, Automattic had by far the most contributors, with 83 people involved. 10up and Yoast are the second biggest contributors with 11 people each. rtCamp and Multidots come third with 6 people each (they dont have much contributions, but they have more contributors than many other companies in the ecosystem!). Then, we have a group of companies with 4 or 5 contributors: Human Made, Bluehost, WP Syntex (the company behind Polylang), Google, XWP, WebDevStudio, and Awesome Motive.
Thank you to everyone who helped
to release WordPress 5.9. Big or small,
each of the above companies contributes
to the Five for the future initiative 💙
Individuals ranking – WordPress 5.9
Here is the top 30 of WordPress 5.9 contributors. You can also checkout the full table on this spreadsheet.
| WP Username | Contributions | Country | Company |
|---|---|---|---|
| hellofromtonya | 363 | United States | Automattic |
| sergeybiryukov | 326 | Russia | Yoast |
| audrasjb | 168 | France | Whodunit |
| jrf | 161 | Netherlands | Advies en zo |
| desrosj | 155 | United States | Bluehost |
| mamaduka | 142 | Georgia | GoDaddy |
| youknowriad | 132 | Algeria | Automattic |
| ntsekouras | 113 | Greece | Automattic |
| joen | 112 | Denmark | Automattic |
| sabernhardt | 83 | United States | |
| mciampini | 79 | Automattic | |
| peterwilsoncc | 78 | Australia | 10up |
| costdev | 73 | ||
| ellatrix | 71 | Bulgaria | Automattic |
| talldanwp | 69 | Australia | Automattic |
| johnbillion | 67 | United Kingdom | Human Made Ltd |
| noisysocks | 66 | Australia | Automattic |
| get_dave | 64 | United Kingdom | Automattic |
| jorgefilipecosta | 61 | Portugal | Automattic |
| glendaviesnz | 56 | ||
| kevinfodness | 55 | United States | Alley (https://alley.co) |
| zieladam | 55 | Poland | Automattic |
| aristath | 49 | Greece | Yoast |
| kevin940726 | 48 | Taiwan | Automattic |
| carlosgprim | 48 | United States | |
| azaozz | 47 | Canada | Automattic |
| isabel_brison | 47 | ||
| poena | 47 | Sweden | Yoast |
| spacedmonkey | 45 | United Kingdom | XWP |
| mukesh27 | 44 | India |
Noteworthy contributors
Below you’ll see the list of noteworthy contributors for this release. Please note that noteworthy contributors are people who took part of the release squad, + people with many contributions or people who contributed a lot of time to help the release to ship (they are nominated by the release leads).
| Noteworthy Contributors | Username | Details | Other details |
|---|---|---|---|
| Matt Mullenweg | matt | Release Lead | |
| Tonya Mork | hellofromTonya | Core Tech Lead | Over 300 contributions / Release coordinator |
| Robert Anderson | noisysocks | Editor Tech Lead | Over 60 contributions / Editor Docs |
| George Mamadashvili | mamaduka | Editor Tech Lead | Over 130 contributions |
| Jb Audras | audrasjb | Triage Lead | Over 160 contributions / Core Docs |
| Marcus Kazmierczak | mkaz | Documentation Lead | Over 30 contributions / Editor Docs |
| Kjell Reigstad | kjellr | Theme Lead | Over 20 contributions |
| Jeff Ong | jffng | Theme Lead | Over 20 contributions |
| Josepha Haden Chomphosy | chanthaboune | MarComms Co-Lead | |
| Mary Baum | marybaum | MarComms Co-Lead | |
| Abha Thakor | webcommsat | MarComms Co-Lead | |
| Anne McCarthy | annezazu | Test Lead | HelpHub Docs |
| Piotrek Boniu | boniu91 | Test Lead | |
| Jonathan Bossenger | psykro | Tech Writer | |
| Ahmed Chaion | chaion07 | Triage Deputy | |
| Milana Cap | milana_cap | Documentation Deputy | |
| Matias Ventura | matveb | Lead Architect of Gutenberg | |
| Sergey Biryukov | sergeybiryukov | Over 300 contributions | Mission Control |
| Juliette Reinders Folmer | jrf | Over 150 contributions | Core Docs |
| Jonathan Desrosiers | desrosj | Over 150 contributions | Bundled Themes updates |
| Riad Benguella | youknowriad | Over 125 contributions | |
| Nik Tsekouras | ntsekouras | Over 100 contributions | |
| Joen A. | joen | Over 100 contributions | |
| Stephen Bernhardt | sabernhardt | Over 75 contributions | Core Docs |
| Marco Ciampini | mciampini | Over 75 contributions | |
| Peter Wilson | peterwilsoncc | Over 75 contributions | Security Team |
| Colin Stewart | costdev | Over 50 contributions | Helped a lot on triage/review |
| André | oandregal | Over 50 contributions | |
| Ella van Durpe | ellatrix | Over 50 contributions | |
| John Blackbourn | johnbillion | Over 50 contributions | |
| Daniel Richards | talldanwp | Over 50 contributions | |
| David Smith | get_dave | Over 50 contributions | |
| Jorge Costa | jorgefilipecosta | Over 50 contributions | |
| Glen Davies | glendaviesnz | Over 50 contributions | |
| Kevin Fodness | kevinfodness | Over 50 contributions | |
| Adam Ziel | zieladam | Over 50 contributions | |
| Ari Stathopoulos | aristath | Over 40 contributions | |
| Kai Hao | kevin940726 | Over 40 contributions | |
| Carlos Garcia | vefusion | Over 40 contributions | |
| Andrew Ozz | azaozz | Over 40 contributions | |
| Isabel Brison | isabel_brison | Over 40 contributions | |
| Carolina Nymark | poena | Over 40 contributions | |
| Jonny Harris | spacedmonkey | Over 40 contributions | |
| Mukesh Panchal | mukesh27 | Over 40 contributions | |
| Beatriz Fialho | beafialho | Twenty Twenty-Two Design | |
| Pablo Honey | pablohoneyhoney | Twenty Twenty-Two Design | |
| Nalini Thakor | nalininonstopnewsuk | About page/MarComms contributions |
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.
