Jonathan Desrosiers on WordPress Releases and Community

Jonathan Desrosiers joins the WP Tavern Jukebox Podcast to talk about making WordPress releases into meaningful community moments, rebuilding contributor momentum after COVID, mentorship and education initiatives, and how AI is changing the open source landscape. Jonathan is a principal software engineer at Bluehost, sponsored through Five for the Future, a Core committer, and a long-time WordPress contributor.

A release as a community moment

Jonathan describes an experiment where a major WordPress release in December 2025 was coordinated with State of the Word in San Francisco. The team staged a live release moment — attendees gathered and pressed a big red button — which created theatre and a sense of celebration. That sparked an idea: why not try aligning big releases with flagship events like WordCamp Asia, WordCamp Europe, and WordCamp US to create synchronized, global community moments?

Practical constraints

While appealing, synchronizing releases with events is not simple. WordCamp dates are driven by venue availability, budgets, regional calendars, and travel patterns, not the Core release schedule. Holidays, end-of-year breaks, and vacations reduce developer availability; December often sees lower productivity. Global coverage is another requirement: release squads must span time zones so work and monitoring continue when some team members are offline or attending events. Importantly, being on-site at an event must not be a prerequisite for contributing; contributors who join remotely are essential to handle issues when on-site folks have connectivity or other limitations.

More than theatrics

Jonathan emphasizes that the goal is not just spectacle. Releases should be celebrations that make contributors and users feel connected to a larger project. At the same time, there is value in faster feedback cycles and clearer communication about upcoming changes. For example, a “coming soon” experience in the dashboard could let people opt into testing early and understand what to expect before auto-updates land.

Feature branches and release cadence

One proposed approach is using feature-specific branches and releases so individuals can opt into and test discrete features earlier. This could promote awareness of particular capabilities and reduce the risk of incomplete work slipping into a major release. But architectural realities complicate that model: many editor parts are tightly coupled as packages, so isolating a single feature for separate release is often non-trivial.

Auto-updates and faster adoption

Auto-updates have made upgrades seamless for many users, which partly explains why releases can go unnoticed. Jonathan looked at adoption patterns and found recent major versions are being adopted more quickly. As an example, WordPress 6.9 reached 50% of sites in ten days — faster than earlier releases — suggesting stronger confidence in stability and auto-updates. This accelerating adoption is a positive signal to lean into when planning release experiences.

Rebuilding community health

Jonathan stresses that community is central: code and license matter less without people to build, maintain, and advocate. COVID disrupted local meetups and the WordCamp leadership pipeline; many organizers burned out or stepped away. Rebuilding requires intentional effort to spark enthusiasm and create clear pathways for new contributors. There are regional differences: APAC communities have shown strong meetup activity and growth, while some areas in the U.S. and Europe continue to struggle to return to pre-pandemic levels.

Mentorship, education, and onboarding

To attract and retain contributors, WordPress initiatives are leaning into education and mentorship. Programs like WP Credits, contributor mentorship cycles, Campus Connect, and other learning efforts aim to turn newcomers into active participants. Jonathan notes that successful contributor journeys often begin in mentorship programs, with mentees eventually becoming mentors and team leads. But awareness alone isn’t enough — the project must be ready with clear tasks, support, and pathways so newcomers can continue contributing beyond a single Contributor Day.

Using release events to onboard people

Coordinated release events offer a chance to pilot onboarding approaches. Making testing accessible — for example, providing a zip of the upcoming release and encouraging attendees to install it and report compatibility data — can be a low-friction way to get people involved. The harder parts are collecting useful testing data, making sense of it, and converting casual testers into repeat contributors.

Attracting younger contributors

Younger people have different expectations. They grew up with powerful, always-connected devices and large closed platforms, so convincing them to invest in open source requires showing concrete benefits: career pathways, relevant experiences, and formats that feel rewarding. Jonathan suggests rethinking event formats, mixing community moments with practical workshops and contribution sprints, and using modern tooling to make contribution feel immediate and meaningful.

AI, empowerment, and the open web

AI is changing how people build and prototype. It can summarize complex information, accelerate experimentation, and lower barriers to getting started with WordPress. But AI-generated outputs often need human expertise for scaling, security, accessibility, and robustness — so the demand for skilled contributors will remain. Meanwhile, renewed interest in alternatives to walled gardens, like RSS and decentralized publishing, reinforces the value of projects that prioritize user control.

Looking forward

Plans for 2026 include experimenting with synchronized releases at flagship events, expanding education programs, and testing ways to make release moments useful for onboarding contributors. These experiments will teach lessons about logistics, engagement, and how to scale welcoming pathways for new participants.

Find Jonathan at jonathandesrosiers.com and as desrosej across many platforms; he is also active in the wordpress.org Slack. For the full podcast and show notes, see wptavern.com/podcast.