Click to read the original WordPress 5.6 development start overview
WordPress 5.5 has been downloaded more than 4 million times since its earlier release, and it’s time to start 5.6 . Josepha Haden will lead the release together with coordinator Dee Teal, and there will be more clues such as Triage (Tonya Mork), Core Tech (Helen Hou-Sandì), Editor Tech (Isabel Brison), Design (Ellen Bauer and Tammie Lister). Women are responsible for managing documents, accessibility, marketing, testing, and other important aspects of publishing. So far, the entire team includes 46 women.
When Josepha Haden formally proposed the idea of establishing a release team composed entirely of women, she emphasized that this does not mean that the release includes only the contributions of women. In addition to the overall goal of releasing a stable and enhanced version of WordPress, Haden also outlined some other goals for this historical version:
I hope that through a release group composed entirely of female identities, we will be able to increase female developers with this kind of experience and (hopefully) become contributors in the Core field and other fields. This does not mean that this release will only include contributions from women. And, if our current team training process shows any signs, it does not mean that we want the team to show up and do so without support.
Francesca Marano , who is the co-director of WordPress 5.3 release, published a post announcing the team and the scope of the release. Two main projects have been completed: the conversion of the widget editing area and the removal of support for PHP 5.6.x. The team plans to provide an impressive set of new features that are still in development:
- Navigation menu block in Core
- Automatically update the main WordPress Core version (opt in)
- New functions of the block editor upgrade.
- Widget editing and custom program support in Core
- Default theme, including FSE compatible version
- PHP 8 support
- Open beta version of the entire site editor
A female iOS developer from Quicken Loans recently posted a tweet asking whether any women in the software development field have held leadership positions. Although many projects and organizations have held women in such positions for many years (as can be seen from the tweet replies), this question shows why representation is still important. WordPress 5.6 provides an opportunity for those who need to see themselves in leadership roles to see more female leaders.
38% of the lead developers of the Internet, let's continue – Helen Housandi (@helenhousandi)
August 12, 2020
So far, the community has been very supportive of the plan to establish a team of women, and is gathering around this idea. WordPress 5.6 is the last version of the annual plan and is expected to land on December 8, 2020.