The Month in WordPress: January 2019


The momentum from December’s WordPress 5.0 release was maintained through January with some big announcements and significant updates. Read on to find out what happened in the WordPress project last month.


WordPress Leadership Grows

In a milestone announcement this month, WordPress project lead, Matt Mullenweg (@matt), named two individuals who are coming on board to expand the leadership team of the project.

As Executive Director, Josepha Haden (@chanthaboune) will oversee all the contribution teams across the project. As Marketing & Communications Lead, Joost de Valk (@joostdevalk) will lead the Marketing team and generally oversee improvements to WordPress.org.

Both Josepha and Joost have contributed to the WordPress project for many years and will certainly have a much larger impact going forward in their new roles.

WordPress 5.1 Development Continues

Immediately after the 5.0 release of WordPress, work started on version 5.1 with some highly anticipated new features coming out in the first beta release. Since then, the second and third betas have been made available.

One of the core updates in this release — a feature to improve the way in which WordPress handles PHP errors — has been pushed back to version 5.2 due to unforeseen issues that would have caused significant delays to the 5.1 release.

Want to get involved in testing or building WordPress Core? You can install the WordPress Beta Tester plugin, follow the Core team blog, and join the #core channel in the Making WordPress Slack group.


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