Hello! We got together to celebrate WordPress’ 21st birthday with a cake and some biryani at the office. Besides the food celebrations, we continued with our yearly tradition of Contributors’ Week.

Contributors’ Week is a dedicated time of the year where we introduce new rtCampers to contributing to WordPress. This time, over 40 rtCampers actively contributed across multiple areas. A dedicated team of committers in the Core, Performance, and WP-CLI teams assisted newcomers in triaging issues and guided them in all aspects. 

As we grow with WordPress each year, we keep being the ‘open source folks‘ and giving back to this community that has allowed us to do 15 years of Good Work!  Here’s how we celebrated 21 years of WordPress, starting with some pictures from the party. 

Core Contributions & Gutenberg

rtCampers contributed to WordPress Core where they worked on several tickets in the WordPress Trac system. The team contributed to 6 tickets for Core. Additionally, our newly joined trainee engineers contributed to 9 Gutenberg tickets with 2 tickets merged.

Performance

There’s a collective effort within the WordPress community for the platform to achieve blazing speeds. Over 7 performance tickets were picked and 5 tickets were merged – some of which required high-precision engineering. 

WP CLI

The WP-CLI community recently celebrated Hack Day on April 26, 2024. This was a single-day activity, and the team continued to build upon this with contributions to 2 tickets.

QA

The importance of thorough testing in maintaining WordPress’ quality and reliability cannot be undermined. The QA team focused on core tickets and tested over 13 core tickets, ensuring each change met the highest standards of functionality and stability. In addition to testing, the team also contributed to translations by translating approximately 20–30 strings into different languages. 

Openverse

While the technical contributions flowed in, rtCampers let their creative sides take over and made their contributions to Openverse – the WordPress Photo Directory. Our shutterbugs contributed a selection of over 70 photographs ranging from iridescent skies and lush blooms to delectable meals!

Translations & Community Support

Hindi, Urdu, Marathi, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Tamil, Gujarati – these are just a few of the languages rtCampers know. Our polyglots suggested over 816 translations localizing WordPress core, plugins and themes helping non-English speaking users fully leverage the power of WordPress. 

Our team was active in the WordPress community, providing support in forums, troubleshooting and finding solutions ensuring a seamless experience for WordPress users.

Wrapping Up…

The value of these contributions goes beyond mere lines of code, it is a reinforcement of the open-source ethos. As we wrap up this year’s Contributors’ Week, we cannot help but marvel at the power of open-source.

Besides the Contributors’ Week, over 20 rtCampers have made contributions to major WordPress releases – 6.3, 6.4 & 6.5. Contributing is not just a once-a-year tradition but a continuous force. We’re glad to see our young engineers join this community and take this legacy forward. 

Thank you to the team for collaborating this week and making meaningful contributions to the WordPress community. 🙇

Links: Make WordPress | Become an rtCamper