A new Core team, a sort of Meta-Core, has been launched to coordinate all aspects of the WordPress core.
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Program transcript
Hello, I’m Alicia Ireland, and you’re listening to WPpodcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
In this episode, you’ll find the information from September 15 to 21, 2025.
The creation of the Core Program Team has been announced, a new team whose goal is to improve coordination among the different WordPress development teams, the Core, increase efficiency, and make it easier for new contributors to integrate without friction.
The role of the team will not be to define the direction of the product, but to facilitate processes: documenting best practices, making roadmaps visible, and supporting new teams with clear processes.
Tammie Lister joins as the first representative, and the initiative is part of an experimental phase to refine internal collaboration.
The focus is on removing obstacles and connecting the different work areas; each Core team keeps its autonomy, but now there will be a point of connection.
And the final details are already being refined for the release of WordPress 6.9, calling regular bug scrub sessions to make sure the release comes out as stable as possible. These meetings will be held twice a week during the “alpha” phase, with the goal of covering different time zones and making global participation easier. As the release date approaches, the number of sessions is expected to increase if needed.
The Documentation team has pointed out that the main Core team was not clear on what the Documentation team’s work is during the launch of a new version.
For version 6.9, a temporary Docs Liaison has been appointed, with the mission of assisting the release team, reviewing the roadmap for user documentation, and collaborating on the day of the final release.
In addition, to help other documenters learn this process, at the next online Documentation Contributor Day there will be a mentoring session on this workflow, and videos will be recorded to be added to the Handbook in the section on documentation process during a new version release.
As a result of the situation of incorporating Documentation into releases, a team member has been temporarily stepped away from their duties.
The decision was made after a series of comments that, according to team leaders, were not aligned with the group’s purposes, which created tensions.
Leadership first tried to handle this privately, asking them to stop publishing those discussions, but since the situation did not change, it was decided to take a step back so their participation could be reassessed. An apology was also issued to the community and to those who felt affected, clarifying that those comments do not reflect the official stance of the Documentation team.
The Community team has launched a call for mentors for the WordPress Credits program, the educational initiative to connect university students with real open source projects.
Mentors, now called Event Supporters, must have experience organizing a WordCamp, have at least 2 hours a week available throughout the program (which lasts between 13 and 18 weeks), meet with their mentees weekly, provide asynchronous support, and commit to offering useful and real mentorship.
Responsibilities include guiding up to 5 students per mentor, helping them navigate contribution tasks, fostering collaboration and accountability, and providing feedback on their progress and final project. Although for now only a limited number of universities in Italy and Costa Rica are participating, WordPress aims to build a global network of mentors for when more institutions join.
And finally, this podcast is distributed under a Creative Commons license as a derivative version of the podcast in Spanish; you can find all the links for more information, and the podcast in other languages, at WPpodcast .org.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
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