Tag Archives: Fun

A History of WordPress Contributors

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I thought I’d run some stats on WordPress contributors over the years. The only contributor stats I have are the ones published in each release announcement on wordpress.org, so I’ve put these stats together myself from those lists.

Unfortunately the release announcements have only listed the contributors since version 2.9 (June 2009). If anyone wants to get me the list of contributors for earlier versions I’ll happily update this post. It’d be interesting to see the numbers over the years.

Contributors by Version

Version 3.0 has so far seen the highest number of individual contributors. The latest version – 3.4 – comes in second with 187. I thought I might see a steady increase with each version, but this is not the case, and we’ll see why below.

Also shown is the number of Trac tickets closed with each version. There’s a noticable reduction in the number of tickets closed since version 3.0 which closed over 1,200 tickets, with recent releases closing fewer than half that number. This correlates nicely with the recent drive to clearly define the scope of each release. We can probably all agree that Jane Wells is to thank for playing a big part in keeping WordPress releases on schedule recently.

Version Contributors Tickets Closed
3.4 183  592
3.3 179  587
3.2 132  409
3.1 173  840
3.0 210 1217
2.9 145  501

Version Involvement

WordPress sees long-term involvement from many people. Almost two hundred people have contributed to at least two different versions of WordPress since 2.9. The list got a bit long, so below I’ve listed the 120 people who have contributed to at least three out of the six versions released. While it’s not a good indication of the level of contributions by each person, it does demonstrate active involvment and an ongoing commitment.

Versions Involved In Person
6 aaroncampbell
batmoo
dd32
demetris
filosofo
johnbillion
johnjamesjacoby
josephscott
mdawaffe
nacin
otto42
scribu
yoavf
5 alexkingorg
arena
azaozz
coffee2code
dougwrites
duck_
ericmann
garyc40
hakre
iammattthomas
iandstewart
joostdevalk
koopersmith
lancewillett
lloydbudd
markjaquith
mattyrob
miqrogroove
mitchoyoshitaka
nathanrice
nbachiyski
niallkennedy
ocean90
petemall
ptahdunbar
ramiy
ryan
sergeybiryukov
simonwheatley
sivel
solarissmoke
sorich87
tenpura
utkarsh
viper007bond
westi
zeo
4 aldenta
ampt
andy
blepoxp
caspie
chrisbliss18
cyberhobo
empireoflight
greenshady
jamescollins
jane
jayjdk
jeremyclarke
johnonolan
jorbin
kawauso
kevinb
koke
markmcwilliams
matveb
mfields
nao
prettyboymp
sirzooro
vanillalounge
wpmuguru
3 andrea_r
andrewryno
barry
boonebgorges
caesarsgrunt
chexee
chipbennett
denis-de-bernardy
dh-shredder
dimadin
dllh
greuben
helenyhou
ipstenu
jacobsantos
jfarthing84
johnpbloch
kovshenin
latz
linuxologos
markoheijnen
michaelh
mikeschinkel
mrmist
pavelevap
peaceablewhale
rasheed
redsweater
rmccue
rosshanney
ruslany
saracannon
sbressler
simek
technosailor
thedeadmedic
tobiasbg
trepmal
usermrpapa
vladimir_kolesnikov
wahgnube
wnorris
xibe
xknown

Total Contributors

WordPress has seen 541 individual contributors over the three years and six versions since 2.9 in July 2009.

And Finally

It’s unfortunate that it’s not as simple to measure the involvement of all those people who contribute to WordPress in ways other than Trac tickets and patches. There are literally hundreds of people who spend their time helping others on the support forums and mailing lists, those who organise and attend WordCamps and WordPress meetups, and those who build and release plugins & themes. Without those people, the almost ten thousand improvements to WordPress wouldn’t be so useful.

Stats Elsewhere

A few other people have previously generated stats regarding contributors to WordPress. If you know of any more articles on contributor stats, leave a comment and I’ll add them to the list.

WordPress Plugin: Instapaper ‘Read Later’ Links

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Latest version: 1.2- Released June 15th, 2012:
  • Update to the new style button from Instapaper. The original black version no longer works.

Description

This plugin allows you to display Instapaper ‘Read later’ links next to each post on your blog just like on Give Me Something To Read. You can either automatically insert the links adjacent to your blog entries, or you can just use the template tag to insert the links wherever you like.

What the hell is Instapaper?

From instapaper.com:

Instapaper is a fast, easy, free tool to save web pages for reading later. When you find something you want to read, but you don’t have time now, you click ‘Read Later’. When you do have time to read, you visit Instapaper on your computer or phone and get whatever you wanted to read.

Check out instapaper.com for all the details and to sign up.

Can I see an example?

The plugin is active on this very blog, so ‘Read Later’ links should show up next to each post title on here.

Screenshot of the plugin in action on the Kubrick theme

The plugin in action on the Kubrick theme

Screenshot of the plugin Settings screen

The plugin Settings screen

Installation

  1. Unzip the ZIP file and drop the folder straight into your ‘wp-content/plugins-’ directory.
  2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
  3. Check out the front page of your blog. A ‘Read Later’ link will now show adjacent to each post.

Usage

By default, this plugin displays a ‘Read Later’ link adjacent to each blog entry on your blog. If you wish to control where the links are displayed, you can go to the Settings -> Read Later Links menu and choose between a few display options.

If you choose to disable automatic placement, you’ll need to add the following code to your theme in order insert the ‘Read Later’ link for each post:

<?php do_action('read_later'); ?>

The code must be inside the WordPress loop.

Thanks

Download

This plugin requires WordPress version 2.7 or later. Tested up to 3.4.2.

Version 1.2 ZIP file from downloads.wordpress.org

Any comments, questions, queries, suggestions, complaints, etc, please leave a comment!

Questionably Useful Thing: Really Big Source Text

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Update (11th August 2007): We now have numbers!

Description

View-source. You’ve gotta love it. But it’s a bit boring sometimes – line after line of hypertext, with the only highlight being nice indentation if you’re lucky. I thought I’d liven things up a bit by putting some nice messages into the source of my web pages. For example:

 _____   ______   _____   _       _____   ______   _____   _____   _____   _____
|  _  | |  __  | |  ___| | |     |  ___| |  __  | |  _  | |_   _| |  ___| |  _  |
| |_| | | |  | | | |__   | |     | |     | |  | | | |_| |   | |   | |__   | |_| |
|    _| | |  | | |  __|  | |     | |     | |  | | |  ___|   | |   |  __|  |    _|
| |\ \  | |__| | | |     | |___  | |___  | |__| | | |       | |   | |___  | |\ \
|_| \_\ |______| |_|     |_____| |_____| |______| |_|       |_|   |_____| |_| \_\

That would surely cheer up any source code haxor. So I decided to spread the love and create a really big source code text generator. Give it a go below.

Instructions

You can use the generator below to create really big source code text for your own website. Type the text you want to show up really big in your source code into the box below. It will show up in the larger text area underneath. Numbers and several punctuation characters work too, you’ll have to try them.

What Now?

Copy and paste the text out of the big text area and whack it into your source! You can paste it into a JavaScript tag as long as you keep the /* and */ in place, but don’t forget to put it between <!-- and --> if you’re just going to whack it into your source. View-source this page if you want to see a huge source text message out in the wild.