WordPress 5.6: An All-Women Release Squad

On December 8, 2020, WordPress 5.6 “Simone” went out to the world. Two days later I am still smiling, because this release is a little bit mine too. I was on the marketing and communications team for 5.6. My name now sits in the credits next to hundreds of people I truly admire.

Why this release was different

Here is what made that feel big. By the end of 2020, WordPress was running close to 40% of all websites on the internet. That’s hundreds of millions of sites, from personal blogs to news giants. Every release lands on all of them. So who builds a release, and who gets a seat at that table, matters far beyond our community.

Every WordPress release has a squad. These are the people who lead it, coordinate it, test it, document it and tell the world about it. For 5.6, every lead role went to women and non-binary contributors. That had never happened before in WordPress history.

The idea came from Josepha Haden, who led the release herself. Her hope was simple. Give more women real release experience, so they come back and keep contributing to Core and beyond. More than eighty people raised their hands and over forty joined the squad. We were split into small cohorts. Each cohort first shadowed the WordPress 5.5 team to learn how a release actually works before running our own.

Diversity is one of the reasons I love this community so much. Seeing a release lead, a tech lead, a triage lead and a test lead who looked a bit like me did something for my confidence that no tutorial ever could.

The people behind Simone

• Josepha Haden led the release and Dee Teal coordinated it.
• Helen Hou-Sandí was core tech lead and Isabel Brison was editor tech lead.
• Ellen Bauer and Tammie Lister led design and Sarah Ricker led accessibility.
• Shawntelle Coker led documentation, Monika Rao led testing and Bet Hannon led support.
• Mel Choyce-Dwan and Carolina Nymark brought the new default theme to life.
• Abha Thakor and Yvette Sonneveld led marketing and communications along with me. It was a real learning experience in how a big release story gets planned, reviewed and shared across the community.

Behind them were 605 volunteers. Together they closed nearly 350 Trac tickets and more than 1,000 pull requests on GitHub, and the release shipped in 38 languages. It was named after Nina Simone, the voice behind “Feeling Good” and “Four Women”. I can’t think of a better name for this one.

What’s new in WordPress 5.6

• More layout freedom in the block editor: single-column and mixed-width layouts, full-width headers and gradients in the Cover block.
• More block patterns, so standard pages come together faster.
• Twenty Twenty-One, a new default theme with soft pastel colors and accessibility built in.
• Captions and subtitles for videos in posts and pages.
• Automatic updates for major releases, which you can now turn on.
• For developers: Application Passwords for the REST API and early work toward PHP 8 support.

You can contribute without writing code

This is the part I most want people to hear. Contributing to WordPress Core is not only for developers. Marketing, documentation, accessibility, design, testing, translation and support all shape a release, and every one of those teams welcomes newcomers.

I started without knowing where I fit. One small task led to the next, and the next one led me here.

Thank you

Congratulations to all the release leads and the hundreds of volunteers who gave thousands of hours to make this release happen. Thank you for making room for so many of us.

If you want to contribute and don’t know where to start, knock me. I’m happy to help you find your first team. You can read the full release story at wordpress.org/news/2020/12/simone.