Experimental Health Dashboards to Track WordPress Team Progress and Stats

Hari Shanker and Courtney Robertson have introduced experimental WordPress contribution health dashboards designed to monitor the performance of various WordPress teams. They also presented the pilot dashboards developed for the Make/WordPress Core, Community, and Training teams, along with key statistics from the WordPress 6.6 release.

History and Challenges

The concept of performance dashboards dates back to 2021 when Community Gardener Ian Dunn started a discussion about “the idea of having a stats dashboard for each Make team. If that’d make a big impact, Meta could build an automated system to facilitate it.” This sparked interest, particularly from the Community and Support teams.

The topic resurfaced at WordCamp Europe 2023, where Matt Mullenweg highlighted the importance of “project health dashboards” that provide better visibility into the performance of various teams. This led to the formation of a working group composed of Naoko Takano, Isotta Peira, Hari Shanker, and Courtney Robertson, tasked with turning this idea into reality.

The team sought community input through project health hangouts this year and analyzed the data using the open-source tool Bitergia Analytics. However, Bitergia lacked integration with several essential tools frequently used by WordPress teams, such as HelpScout, Figma, Trac, SVN, and GlotPress. To fill this gap, the working group manually analyzed additional data sources, including the WordPress 6.6 props list and internal contributor data from the Community and Training teams.

Hari Shanker acknowledged the challenges in manual data compilation, stating, “Manually compiling the data is time-consuming and may not be sustainable. @courane01 and I invested significant effort into preparing them. If they prove valuable, we hope to encourage other Make/Teams to create their own and explore a project-wide dashboard, though this could be resource-intensive.”

Key Insights From the Dashboards

The Core Team dashboard reveals that 37% of WordPress 6.6 contributors were new, highlighting the project’s ability to attract fresh talent. However, there’s a growing concern as the number of inactive contributors in 2024 is rising, and close/merge rates in Core GitHub repositories are declining. Contributions tend to spike around major releases, and much of the work is driven by sponsored contributors from companies like Automattic, Yoast, GoDaddy, and 10up.

The Training Team has exceeded its goals, achieving a 50% retention rate for video content and an enrollment rate of almost 60% for its courses. The Learning Pathways project also performed well, with high enrollment and course completion rates, along with an impressive 90% learner satisfaction rate.

The Community Team is just shy of its 45% target for new attendee participation, with a current rate of 44.76%. While the number of WordPress events dipped after the pandemic, the team has seen steady improvement in event participation as in-person gatherings continue to recover.

Key Insights From WordPress 6.6 Stats

Major points include:

Approximately 640 people from 53 countries and 129 companies contributed to WordPress 6.6.

241 people contributed to WordPress Core for the first time, making up about 38% of the total contributors.

The USA led with 1033 contributions, followed by Australia with 762 contributions.

In terms of contributors by country, the USA had 84, followed by India with 69, and Bangladesh with 23.

Automattic had the largest number of contributors (105 people), followed by rtCamp (14), and 10up (12).

26.5% of all WordPress 6.6 contributors were officially pledged through Five for the Future, accounting for 75.5% of all props.

Next Steps

“Our long-term goal is to build automated, live dashboards for WordPress,” Hari Shanker revealed. The dashboards are in the experimental phase and future developments will depend on community feedback. Feedback can be submitted in the comments section of the post till October 7, 2024.