During May, my primary focus was on the release of 6.5.3 and the discussions that led up to the decision to do the upcoming release of 6.5.4. It’s also a month that I have taken some time off to celebrate my birthday (which Pascal celebrated in a commit message, the third time one committer wished another happy birthday) and to be a tourist as I get ready for WordCamp Europe. Overall, I worked on WordPress a bit less this month than in April.

Here is the image of a picturesque hillside in Italy’s Liguria region with the text “My May in WordPress” overlaid on it. Let me know if you need any further adjustments!

The conversations related to 6.5.4 began in private in order to fully understand the problem space. We needed to ask plugin companies for data that they might not want to be made public. The conversations shifted to being public as quickly as possible and proposals were brought forward which led to a decision that I think will help resolve some of the lingering issues from the introduction of Plugin Dependencies. It’s not without side effects, but hopefully, those can be mitigated in the long term.

A big accomplishment that affects very few people is that I published an update to the releasing minor versions handbook page focused on the day of release. Over the coming months, my hope is to put a lot of what I’ve learned into documentation. It shouldn’t be an undue burden for any trusted contributor to lead a minor release.

May also marked six months since I first started looking for and accepting sponsorship. It is not yet at a point where this can sustain me long-term. I applied for a grant from the Open Technology Fund which would go a long way to helping, but I am hopeful that at WordCamp Europe I’m able to find a few more organizations interested in sponsoring me.

By the numbers

During the month of May, I contributed to 56 tickets on trac, made 15 commits to core, received 17 props, ran 3 release parties, drafted one dev note that won’t need to be published, and worked approximately 75 hours on WordPress, of which my sponsors paid for slightly less than 17 and I donated the rest.

I had 14 sponsors this month: JeffMatson, jeffpaul, philipjohn, zstepek, kkoppenhaver, mamaduka, kingkool68, austinginder, adamsilverstein, felixarntz, Emilia-Capital, desrosj, bacoords and one who wishs to remain anonymous. Thank you for believing in and supporting my contributions to Open Source.

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