Aki Hamano

A look back at this year’s WordPress contributions and goals for next year

As the year comes to an end, I decided to take a look back at what I have done in the WordPress community this year.

Summary of activities

My main team is the core team, which means I communicate with other contributors online through GitHub and Trac, raise issues and tickets, and read and write code. Thankfully, I was supported by three companies: LOOS, Hostinger, and Kinsta, and I spent more than 25 hours a week contributing.

It is difficult to visualize all activity, but as of December 27th, the issues, tickets, and pull requests submitted in 2025 for Gutenberg and WordPress core are as follows:

In addition to these, I also tested and triaged issues submitted by other contributors and reviewed pull requests almost daily.

I also thought back to the activities outside of core development, and found the following:

Contributing to Gutenberg

WordPress development is broadly divided into two parts: core and Gutenberg. I have mostly worked on Gutenberg, and I would like to highlight some of the tasks and features that made the biggest impression on me.

Notes

This is the so-called “block commenting feature,” and it was released in WordPress 6.9. I’ve been involved in developing this feature since around September, but there was so much to do that I honestly thought to myself, “Will this feature not make it in time for 6.9?” However, by communicating closely with many wonderful contributors, we were able to solve the enormous number of tasks one by one, and I’m pleased that we were able to successfully release it in WordPress 6.9.

Notes iteration for WordPress 6.9 · Issue #66377 · WordPress/gutenberg

Time to Read block

I wrote the initial code for this block, which was merged into the Gutenberg project in February 2023. However, accessibility concerns were raised, and two years passed without it being shipped to core.

I wondered if it would just remain in the Gutenberg plugin, but around August, things suddenly started moving forward, and after several enhancements and improvements, it was released in WordPress 6.9. I suspect this was probably influenced by this issue, which proposes further enhancing the default blocks.

When I first wrote the code for this block, I thought, “It’ll just be a block that simply divides the content by an arbitrary number and outputs it,” but I learned a lot in the series of tasks leading up to the core release, such as the true difficulty of counting characters and the importance of accessibility.

Preparing the Post Editor for Full iframe Integration

Please see the link below for details, but the current post editor may or may not work as an iframe depending on the version of the registered block. Our goal is to have it work consistently as an iframe in the future, but because there are some plugins that don’t work well when the post editor is an iframe, our focus was on how and when to transition to the iframe editor.

I understand that there has been a lot of reaction and concern regarding this matter, so I hope to continue to proceed carefully in 2026 to avoid causing as much confusion and anxiety as possible to consumers.

First plugin release

The Gutenberg project is developed on a GitHub repository, and with each major release of WordPress, the latest version of Gutenberg is bundled into the core. At the same time, Gutenberg itself is a plugin, and major updates are released every two weeks.

These releases seem to be rotated among available contributors, and this year I was able to take charge of two of these releases for the first time.

Responsibilities as a Triage Lead

From here, I’d like to write about some of the most memorable events in 2025, other than my contributions to Gutenberg.

WordPress had two major releases in 2025: 6.8 and 6.9. A release team is formed for each WordPress release, and I had the honor of serving as Triage Lead for the 6.9 release alongside Ryan Welcher.

To sum up my role, I reviewed and prioritized tasks and decided what to do with them for that release. I technically understood the many tickets and issues submitted daily, assigned them to appropriate statuses, and communicated with contributors to ensure they were addressed appropriately by the deadline. This work was quite challenging, as I had to do it in parallel with my own development and reviews for the release, but I believe it helped me develop quick decision-making skills and a broad range of technical knowledge.

Another role as Triage Lead was to organize a weekly “Bug Scrub” session, where we triaged tickets in real time via text chat on Slack. However, I realized it would be impossible to conduct the Bug Scrub, understand the contents of the tickets, and communicate with the participants all on the spot in English. So I prepared several English translations of the text I thought I might use in the Bug Scrub in advance so I could paste them into the chat right away, and I also understood the tickets I would be triaging that week in advance so that I could focus on communicating with the other participants at the Bug Scrub on the day.

However, since the fundamental problem was my own poor English ability in the first place, I was once again painfully reminded that I need to be more fluent and quick in reading and writing English.

My first core commit

The WordPress core code is managed in an SVN repository, and contributors with commit access to that repository are called “core committers.”

I was given commit access around September 2024, but every time I had code that needed to be committed to core, I would ask another core committer to commit the code, saying, “I’m not yet familiar with core commits or SVN.”

I realized this wasn’t ideal, so I prepared a code to commit, and with the help of other committers, I was able to successfully perform my first commit. I still get nervous when committing because I’m not very familiar with SVN, and there are strict rules regarding the format of commit messages.

Goals for next year

Thankfully, looking back, this year has been another year immersed in WordPress. I hope that next year will be the same, but I would like to write about some of the things I hope to be able to do.

Contributing to WordPress 7.0

Three major releases are planned for 2026, and a roadmap for the first of these, 7.0, has been announced. While it’s not guaranteed that all of the tasks listed on the roadmap will be completed in 7.0, I would like to focus on working toward 7.0 in January and February of next year so that as many tasks as possible, including those I’m involved in, can be released in 7.0.

Involvement in other projects

I’m really enjoying contributing to Gutenberg development. But at the same time, I feel like I need to get involved in projects other than Gutenberg and broaden my technical knowledge of WordPress.

The projects I’m interested in right now are those related to AI. I have several related projects going on in parallel, and I’d like to use some of the time I can spare to contribute little by little.

Involvement in OSS other than WordPress

If I only contribute to WordPress, my knowledge and experience will inevitably be biased towards the programming languages ​​and technologies used in WordPress. I am aware of this, and I always feel that as an engineer, I need to gain a wider range of experience.

In 2026, I would like to start getting involved in some way with a project that is as far removed from WordPress as possible, preferably open source software. I believe that experience will, in the long run, be useful in contributing to WordPress.

Finally

Thanks to so many people, I was able to get through another year safely. I would like to express my gratitude once again to everyone who was involved and helped me.

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