The WordPress core development team builds WordPress! Follow this site for general updates, status reports, and the occasional code debate. There’s lots of ways to contribute:
WordPress 5.3 will be the final major release of 2019 and aims to polish current interactions and make the UIs more user friendly. Matt Mullenweg is the Release Lead for 5.3, Francesca Marano is the Release Coordinator, David Baumwald is the Triage PM, Riad Benguella is the Editor Tech Lead, Mark Uraine is the Editor Design Lead, Andrew Ozz is the Core Tech Lead, Anders Norén is the Default Theme Design Lead, Ian Belanger is the Default Theme Wrangler, Justin Ahinon is the Docs Coordinator, JB Audras is the Accessibility Lead, Mike Reid is the Marketing Lead, and Mike Schroder is the Media Focus Lead. All release decisions will ultimately be theirs to make and communicate while gathering input from the community. There will be a new bundled theme included in 5.3.
Note that WordCamp US will be from November 1-3 and the US Thanksgiving holiday is November 28-29. Both tend to involve travel for a number of people and reduced activity; thus the schedule was crafted to allow ~2 weeks buffer from the target release date until Thanksgiving week. Given the effort that goes into a major release, WCUS, and the end-of-year holidays it is safe to assume that activity on core will slow dramatically after the 5.3 release until January 2020; enjoy that downtime and thank you all for your contributions! 🙏
From this point on, no more commits for any new enhancements or feature requests in this release cycle, only bug fixes and inline documentation. Work can continue on enhancements/feature requests not completed and committed by this point, and can be picked up for commit again at the start of the WordPress 5.4 development cycle.
To get involved in WordPress core development, head on over to Trac and pick a 5.3 ticket. Need help? Check out the Core Contributor Handbook. Get your patches done and submitted as soon as possible, then help find people to test the patches and leave feedback on the ticket. Patches for enhancements will not be committed after the dates posted above, so that we can all focus on squashing bugs and deliver the most bug-free WordPress ever.
If you want to dive deeper into 5.3, development is discussed at a weekly meeting in the #core Slack channel and occurs next at Wednesday at 21:00 UTC. Wish us luck!
