WordPress 6.8.0 was released April 15,2025. Following this release, work will continue with regular, planned maintenance or minor releases. While the work of a major release A release, identified by the first two numbers (3.6), which is the focus of a full release cycle and feature development. WordPress uses decimaling count for major release versions, so 2.8, 2.9, 3.0, and 3.1 are sequential and comparable in scope. team includes people filling approximately 16 different positions, maintenance release teams generally are considerably smaller, often 1-3 people. Minor release A set of releases or versions having the same minor version number may be collectively referred to as .x , for example version 5.2.x to refer to versions 5.2, 5.2.1, 5.2.3, and all other versions in the 5.2 (five dot two) branch of that software. Minor Releases often make improvements to existing features and functionality. managers are responsible for:
- Triaging bugs in coordination with committers and component maintainers.
- Drafting announcements for the release.
- Preparing for and running release day activities.
- Updating the documentation on minor releases so that it gets better each time.
Members of the 6.8 release cohort are encouraged to stay on as release managers for maintenance releases, but it is not required to have been on a major release squad in order to be on a minor release team.
Since 6.9 is not currently scheduled until 2026, we are not asking folks to lead minor releases for 9+ months. Rather, we are looking for folks who could help lead for shorter periods of time, like 3 months. If folks are able to lead for a longer period of time, that’s wonderful, but we expect to rotate folks in and out every 3 months so that no single person has to shoulder the work through to the next major release.
If you are interested in volunteering to be a release manager for the 6.8 maintenance releases, please comment on this post.
Thanks to @jeffpaul, @jorbin, @joedolson for reviewing this post before publication.
