WordPress: only one major release in 2025

Just one new major release instead of three: WordPress is significantly reducing the number of new versions, at least for this year. The decision was made by almost 30 central developers of the open-source project at a joint meeting on March 27. According to the announcement, the reason for this is a sharp decrease in the number of contributions from companies measured in hours. Specifically, the number of new features in progress in the Gutenberg repository has fallen since the beginning of the year, while the number of Gutenberg and core tickets has remained constant over the past six months.

This will (hopefully) get better

According to the announcement, the participants weighed up the pros and cons of the move: The fact that this rhythm has become established for other large projects would speak in favor of only one release. It would also allow developers to concentrate on quality and improve documentation. There would no longer be pure bug fix releases. Above all, however, thanks to the time gained, more work would be done on the so-called canonical plug-ins. These are extensions from community maintainers that have an official WordPress stamp. They include important functions that can be delivered and updated independently of the core release.

In addition, the developers want to devote more time to the backlog of around 13,000 tickets on Trac and Gutenberg's GitHub repository. WordPress intends to deliver the majority of the resulting bug fixes in minor releases. Furthermore, more tickets are to be closed with 'maybelater'; discussions could still take place in these. In general, a large backlog of open tickets can damage a project's reputation for quality.

The announcement also addresses the potential problems of a single major release per year: less feedback from users on new features could be received and developers would have to wait longer for their work to appear – which could affect the perceived recognition. It is also more difficult to introduce functions spread over several versions. In addition, individual major releases are potentially nerve-wracking for users when updating. Finally, WordPress as a project runs the risk of being perceived as sleepy.

The role of Automattic

Nevertheless, the decision was made that version 6.8 would be the only major release this year. The version is due to be released this month. The move will have no impact on the minor releases – either in terms of their frequency or scope. WordPress does not provide any information about major releases in the coming years in the announcement. WordPress did not respond to a corresponding request in the comments.

What is explosive about the move, however, is that the contributions of one company in particular have fallen drastically since January: Automattic, whose CEO Matt Mullenweg is – and who is also the initiator and lead developer of WordPress. According to Automattic, the reasons for this are the dispute with WP Engine, as well as the “fierce” criticism and personal hostility towards Mullenweg and employees of the company. Following the dispute with WP Engine, Automattic intends to ramp up its work on WordPress again – but there is no end in sight. What's more, Mullenweg was forced to lay off 16 percent of its employees just last week.

(fo)