Foxe 
WordPress 4.7 — named “Vaughan” in honour of the jazz vocalist Sarah “Sassy” Vaughan — shipped today. And for the first time, my name is in the list of core contributors. It’s a small patch, but seeing your name in a release that runs on millions of sites is a hard feeling to put into words.
The 4.7 release was led by Helen Hou-Sandí with release deputies Jeff Paul and Aaron Jorbin. There were 482 contributors this cycle — 205 of them for the first time, including me.
Giving back
Almost everything I build on belongs to open source. WordPress, Drupal, Laravel — I lean on them every day, for personal projects and professional work alike. So I try to give back to the community whenever I can. Over the years that’s mostly meant building and maintaining a handful of free WordPress plugins; I’d like to do more as I learn.
The contribution
One of the best ways to give back is to contribute to core itself, because a single fix there can help millions of websites at once. That thought alone was enough motivation to turn a private workaround into a real patch.
I hit the bug while importing content into a multisite install. After installing the WordPress Importer plugin, the AJAX response came back with a broken link. I fixed it for my own site first by editing a single core file — the kind of quick patch that’s easy to keep to yourself and move on.
Instead, I opened a ticket on WordPress Core Trac (#37943) with a patch. After a few rounds of feedback from other committers, a refined version landed in WordPress 4.7.
That’s the whole loop, and it’s smaller than people expect: notice something broken, fix it locally, then take the extra step of writing it up for everyone else.
If you want to start
You don’t need to be a core committer to help. A good first step is Get involved — the Make WordPress hub, where every team (core, docs, polyglots, support, design) lists ways to jump in. Plenty of contributions never touch PHP at all.
The contribution itself was tiny. The lesson wasn’t: the projects we all depend on are only as healthy as the people willing to file the ticket instead of quietly patching their own copy. Thanks to WordPress and the community around it for making that first step so welcoming.
— JJ
Frequently asked questions
- How do I make my first WordPress core contribution?
- Find a bug, fix it locally, then open a ticket with a patch on WordPress Core Trac. Committers review it, and once accepted your fix ships in a future release. Non-code contributions are also available through the Make WordPress teams.
- What was WordPress 4.7?
- WordPress 4.7, codenamed "Vaughan", was released on December 7, 2016. It was led by Helen Hou-Sandí with 482 contributors, 205 of whom were contributing to core for the first time.
- Do you need to be a committer to contribute to WordPress core?
- No. Anyone can open a Trac ticket and attach a patch; core committers review and merge it. Many valuable contributions — documentation, translation, support and design — involve no code at all.