Nathan Wrigley hosts Jonathan Desrosiers on the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern to discuss WordPress sustainability, community engagement, and release strategies. Jonathan is a principal software engineer at Bluehost, sponsored through Five for the Future to contribute to WordPress. He’s been a Core committer for nearly eight years and a contributor for over a decade, focusing on contributor experience, automation, mentorship, and making it easier for people to participate.
Synchronized releases and events
A recent release coincided with State of the Word, creating a theatrical, live moment where attendees celebrated the release together. That experiment inspired thinking about aligning major WordPress releases with flagship community events—WordCamp Asia, WordCamp Europe, and WordCamp US—to create synchronized release moments that feel like shared celebrations and draw attention to the project.
Logistics and constraints
Aligning releases with events is appealing but challenging. WordCamps are scheduled around budgets, regional holidays, venue availability, and travel considerations—not the software release cadence. Holidays like Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, and regional religious observances constrain when contributors are available. Release planning must consider branching and development timelines, feature-complete deadlines, and the reality that global coverage requires contributors across time zones. The idea isn’t to force event planners to change dates, but to try coordinated releases where feasible and learn from doing so.
Global coverage and release squads
Planning release squads with a geographic spread helps ensure continuous coverage during the release window and accounts for contributors who attend events in person vs. those who remain remote. Having people in different time zones helps investigate and respond to issues as contributor days end in one region and begin in another.
Making releases meaningful and visible
Jonathan and Nathan discuss ways to increase awareness and excitement around releases. Rather than only showing an “about” page after a manual update, WordPress could proactively highlight upcoming features in the dashboard ahead of a release—akin to TV trailers—encouraging testing and early involvement. Feature branch models and package management could enable clearer, more modular ways to present and ship features, though architectural complexity and backwards compatibility make that difficult at scale.
Auto-updates and adoption trends
Auto-updates have made upgrades seamless for many users, which is a sign of stable releases. Jonathan examined adoption data: recent major releases reached adoption thresholds faster than previous ones. For example, WordPress 6.9 reached the 50% threshold of all WordPress sites in 10 days—four days faster than 6.8—and adoption rates are accelerating across recent releases. This indicates confidence in the quality of releases and more people opting into auto-updating major versions.
Community health and recovery
The community is central to open source. COVID disrupted contributor pipelines: people who kept Meetups and WordCamps running often burned out or left, interrupting mentorship and leadership handoffs. Regions differ—APAC communities have been growing and show strong local activity, while some US and EU communities struggle to regain pre-pandemic attendance and speaker availability. Rebuilding requires reproofing community value and making involvement feel worthwhile.
Education, mentorship, and onboarding
Initiatives like WP Credits, Campus Connect, contributor mentorship programs, and contributor days aim to attract and activate new contributors. Successful mentorship cycles have produced contributors who later become mentors and leaders. Contributor Days and release-related events should emphasize finishing contributors’ work—getting patches tested and committed—so newcomers see tangible results and have pathways to continue contributing.
Engaging younger contributors
Younger generations grew up with the web and closed platforms; convincing them of open source’s value requires both outreach and clear, supported pathways. Educational programs in schools and universities can expose new contributors to open source, but communities must be ready to activate and support them with clear criteria, small projects, and mentorship to sustain engagement.
AI, empowerment, and the open web
AI is changing how people build and learn. It can empower individuals to try tasks—building sites, experimenting with content, or fixing things—by distilling vast information into understandable guidance. This empowerment, combined with renewed interest in owning content (RSS, personal blogs, Fediverse), suggests an opportunity for WordPress: it offers ownership, flexibility, and control that closed platforms may not. While AI lowers barriers to create, scaling and long-term maintenance still require reliable software and community support.
Experiments and pilots
Synchronized releases at events can serve as pilot opportunities to test improved onboarding, testing processes, and ways to make release testing meaningful for newcomers. In-person events give immediate feedback and a chance to iterate on processes that could later scale for remote contributors.
Outlook
Jonathan sees renewed enthusiasm to build with WordPress alongside challenges in rebuilding local communities. He hopes synchronized release moments, better onboarding, education initiatives, and leveraging AI’s empowerment can attract new contributors and sustain the project. The goal is to keep WordPress relevant and supported by a diverse, active community for years to come.
Where to find Jonathan
jonathandesrosiers.com — desrosej across social platforms; also available on the WordPress.org Slack.
