Taking a detour from our posts about theme development for this week, we’ll be talking about an aspect of the “core” development of WordPress itself. If you’re developing themes and plugins for WordPress, you may also want to consider helping developing WordPress itself. WordPress is open-source, and, as such, anybody can contribute code to it.

A good way to follow along (and have a chance to discuss) with the development of WordPress is to join the weekly IRC chats. During these IRC discussions, “core developers” (those who have the ability to commit changes to WordPress) and community developers (those who contribute code, without having commit access to WordPress) will discuss the development of the next version of WordPress.

A rough agenda for the chat is usually created a week before the chat. You can participate in suggesting items for the agenda here. These IRC chats happen every Thursday at 9PM UTC during the active development stages for WordPress. You can join in on these chats on the #wordpress-dev channel on irc.freenode.com using an IRC client.

If you’re interesting in the core development of WordPress, join in on these chats and voice your opinion (or just sit back and follow along silently, if you prefer).