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.

Further Reading:

• The WordPress Coding Standards team released version 2.0 this month.
• In her new role as Executive Director, Josepha Haden looks at what contributors need to help support them more effectively.
• Approximately 2,300 tickets in the Core bug tracker were closed in a large bulk edit this month due to their inactivity over the last two years.
• Autocomplete for usernames has been added to the WordPress Support Forums, making it much easier to communicate directly with individuals.
• Work continues on the Gutenberg project, expanding into more areas of the WordPress dashboard.
• Since the new WordPress Support portal release in December, work has been ongoing to improve its features and complete the content migration.
• The Plugin Review team has published an important reminder about behavior in the Plugin Directory and support forums.

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