Tag Archives: contributors

Credits page for WordPress 3.3

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The WordPress 3.3 credits page was updated today, for likely the final time. In five months, there were nearly 1,200 individual changes to WordPress (and counting).

The credits page lists every individual who contributed to the latest release. A few stood out for their contributions, not just of high quantity, but of tremendous quality: Dominik Schilling (ocean90), Cristi Burcă (scribu), and Sergey Biryukov. The three are listed as contributing developers to 3.3. The core team — including guest committers Jon Cave (duck_) and Daryl Koopersmith — worked with these three daily, and they had a collective hand in nearly every major task this release.*

There were also three individuals added to the ‘Recent Rockstars’ group for their recent contributions to core development. This release we chose Chelsea Otakan (chexee), Helen Hou-Sandi, and John Blackbourn (johnbillion). All together, the six contributing  developers and rockstars we’ve recognized contributed more than a fourth of all Trac comments and two-fifths of all props.

If you want to see the full list, click the WordPress icon in the 3.3 toolbar and head on over to the credits page, or wait for the release post (coming soon!). Maybe I’ll also experiment with a word cloud again as I’ve done in the past.

In WordPress 3.4, we plan to recognize first-time contributors on the page, so if want to see your name in lights on the credits page, contribute to WordPress.

* Fun fact: Average age of the five mentioned in this paragraph: 23.

Visualizing the WordPress 3.0 contributors

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After noting that I wanted to start congratulating new WordPress contributors on Twitter, Ozh Richard suggested I make a word cloud, as had been done in some previous releases.

So, based on a Trac report I made for demetris so he can compile the list of contributors, I generated these word clouds. These are based on changesets 12456 to 14319 (thus, as of this morning). Of 1864 commits, 677 of them had props given, for a total of 720 props (some commits had more than one). Patches were contributed by 170 people so far, the most ever (or so I’m told).

It was embarrassingly easy. I did a tab-delimited export of the report, grepped out what I didn’t want, and manually scanned the list for misspellings. Took me maybe 15 minutes on the flight to WordCamp San Francisco (I’m also in the air while posting this). Then I used Wordle for the cool visualization, and TagCrowd for the more functional one. (TagCrowd is also what Peter Westwood used in one of the clouds linked above.)

Frumph asked how a contributor is defined in this context, so let me do that. When the core team commits code, we mention the authors of the patch in the commit message by awarding “props,” such as “props nacin.” (You know, like giving “kudos.” Same deal.) We don’t give them to ourselves, but if there’s no props listed, then you can assume we wrote the code (or forgot the prop).

A disclaimer: These may not be accurate, with the reasons ranging from oddly formatted commit messages all the way to issues with my compiling.

Another disclaimer: Yes, I’m sorry my name is so big. I really am. I contributed a lot of code before becoming a committer, and this does actually exclude commits by the core team, including my own. (We made more than 1,000 commits on our own.) So my name is about six weeks from late December to early February. In 3.1, my name will be much smaller. :-)

I’d hope this goes without saying, but props are not why I contribute to WordPress. I don’t keep a tally. This is just a cool visualization that shows the sheer breadth of the number of contributors, plus who some of the larger contributors are. Also, quantity does not equal quality.

Without further ado, the pretty Wordle:

And from TagCrowd (click for a much larger size):