WordPress.org Profiles Now Show Activity for Contributions Made on GitHub

WordPress.org profiles got an update over the weekend that will make them a better reflection of contributors’ efforts on GitHub. Users can now authorize GitHub to detect their activity on the WordPress GitHub organization and display it on their profiles.

“Currently we’re tracking New Issues submitted (by you), Closed Issues (by you), Pull requests submitted (by you), Pull requests merged (by you, and additionally the PR submitter gets a ‘PR Merged’ event), and finally Pushes to default branches,” WordPress lead developer Dion Hulse said.

There are a few reasons why one’s contributions might not be visible after linking accounts. The meta team has not built an importer for all previous issues and pull requests, so WordPress.org only has data from last Friday and onwards. Early adopters who linked their accounts when the feature was first being tested may need to re-authenticate since the earlier version had expired connections.

Linking accounts will help make it easier for the WordPress project to track contributions across multiple locations.

“In recent releases, the process of collecting props for non-WordPress.org contributions (namely Gutenberg) has been highly manual and error prone, occasionally resulting in contributors not receiving proper credit,” Jonathan Desrosiers said when rolling out the first version of the app in March 2020. “Connecting your WordPress.org and GitHub accounts will allow automatic tooling to be built which reduces the burden on release teams to maintain a credit list.”

Users who want to have their profiles include GitHub activity can navigate to the Edit Profile page on WordPress.org, launch the app, and authorize their accounts with one click.

Hulse is collecting feedback regarding adding more events (i.e. commenting on issues/PRs), combining events (i.e. Submitted & Merged), and anything else that might improve the quality of activity tracked. Riad Benguella suggested adding a selector to filter the timeline by activity type. Hulse responded that the way profiles are currently set up, querying specific activities cannot currently be done in a performant way but that there are meta trac tickets (#479 and #518) where they are discussing a broader overhaul for profiles.

With a great deal more activity coming in from GitHub, the ability to filter these activities might make WordPress.org a more comprehensive tool for assessing job candidates or verifying Five for the Future contributions. If you have more ideas for the feature, you can leave feedback on the announcement.