Codex

Interested in functions, hooks, classes, or methods? Check out the new WordPress Code Reference!

Mailing Lists

The WordPress project has a number of email lists focused on different facets of development. Note that none of these lists are appropriate for user support. The best place for user support is the WordPress Support Forums. For some other support options, see Other Community Sites.

You'll also want to visit Make WordPress. It has overviews of the development teams, update blogs, and additional facet specific documentation. There are many community led teams that don't use a mailing list for their communications.

Mailing List Etiquette

When joining a mailing list, consider these few reminders that shall keep mailing lists happy and productive places for everyone:

  • Don't berate anyone, it's better not to reply. Be polite.
  • Give people the benefit of the doubt.
  • Remember English isn't everyone's first language.
  • Feel free to reply to someone off-list.
  • Discuss ideas, not people.
  • Please don't complain about excessive mailing list volume. Doing so adds to the volume and this is just how mailing lists work. If you want to switch to daily updates, do so. Or use your email client to filter mailing lists into separate folders so they don't clutter your inbox.

Announcement Mailing Lists

These announcement lists are one-way only and are low traffic (a few emails per year).

WordPress Announcements

This list is meant for major announcements regarding the WordPress project, like new releases.

Subscribe / Unsubscribe

You can subscribe to or unsubscribe to the Announcement Mailing Lists using the following instructions.

  1. Go to Your WordPress.org Support Forum profile
  2. Log in (if you're not already logged in).
  3. Here, you can subscribe or unsubscribe by checking or unchecking the box accordingly.
  4. Click the Submit button to make the change.

Community Mailing Lists

These discussion lists are two-way and can be very high traffic at times (easily dozens of emails per day).

Accessibility

The wp-accessibility list is for people discussing the accessibility of the WordPress administrative interface.

Documentation

The wp-docs list was created to facilitate coordination and collaboration between members of the community who want to contribute to WordPress documentation. No coding skills required, just a lot of patience. The list tends to be low-traffic, but can have bursts of activity.

Testers

The wp-testers list is meant for people to discuss the current nightly or alpha/beta version of WordPress. If you want to discuss the latest nightly or a certain bug report in Trac, feel free to drop in. See Using Subversion for information on where to download development versions of WordPress.

Translation/Polyglots/Localization

The WP Polyglots group is designed to support and encourage translation and localization efforts for WordPress, often supporting the international community and versions of WordPress. If you have translation and localization coding skills, you are invited and welcome to join the group.

User Interface

The wp-ui list is meant for people to to discuss ways to improve the interface or user experience of WordPress, and to discuss progress on design-related projects.

XML-RPC

The wp-xmlrpc list for the XML-RPC topic relating to WordPress.

Hackers

The wp-hackers list is meant for people interested in extending WordPress either through plugins or improvements to the core code.

Said another way, "the wp-hackers list is a place for advanced development discussion (hacking) and WordPress core discussion. This means it's not well suited for general development discussion and support questions primarily because a certain level of working knowledge of WordPress and PHP is assumed."

The list can be fairly high traffic at times, if you don't want to subscribe check out the summary.

Support Forum Volunteers

The WordPress Support Forum Volunteers work hard to help users answer questions about WordPress. Discussions pertaining to providing support to users and WordPress Forum issues and activities are found in the WordPress Support Forum Mailing list. Support questions will not be answered.

If you would like to volunteer to help on the WordPress Forum, we recommend you follow Make/Support.

For specific WordPress support questions, please direct your inquiries to WordPress Support Forum.

Edu

The wp-edu list is for people interested in using WordPress in education.

SVN / CVS updates

Updates to the SVN repository are mirrored on the WP-SVN mailing list. Whenever a change is checked in to the WordPress repository an email is sent to the wp-svn list with a listing of each of the lines that changed. This is very useful if you want to follow WordPress development very closely. This is an announcement-only list, which means if you want to discuss a change please use the hackers list.


The wp-svn list supercedes the old CVS mailing list.

The archives for the CVS mailing list are available for historic purposes at the following location:

Trac

The wp-trac list reports additions and changes to Tickets at Trac, the WordPress bug tracking system.

Meta

The wp-meta list reports additions and changes to tickets on Meta Trac. Meta Trac covers various aspects of WordPress.org including the main .org website, buddypress.org, wordcamp.org, the make P2 blogs, handbooks, mailing lists, management of the support forums, theme and plugin repositories, and others.

Issues for these components were previously reported via the main core Trac, but were split off to Meta Trac in mid-2013.

Manage Mailing List Preferences

For the Announcement Mailing Lists, see the Subscribing / Unsubscribing section above.

For the Community Mailing Lists, visit the webpages listed above under the appropriate mailing list. You can also perform certain actions on these mailing lists by sending special emails to specific email addresses. Please do not send emails to the list itself asking to be unsubscribed, or removed. Use the webpage for the list or the following email commands :

These email commands work only when you send mail from the mail account for which you want to change or update preferences. In the following section <list-name> stands for the name of the list in questions, such as 'hackers' or 'wp-docs'. If in doubt, remember that the <list-name> is the same as the portion that precedes the @wordpress.org in the email address you use to send emails to the mailing list.


You can request help regarding managing preferences and subscription options by sending a mail to <list-name>-request@lists.automattic.com with "help" in the Subject of the email. For example, to request help with preferences and options for the wp-hackers mailing list, you should send an email to wp-hackers-request@lists.automattic.com with the word "help" (without the quotes, of course), in the Subject field of the email.

You can subscribe to the list by sending an email to <list-name>-subscribe@lists.automattic.com with "subscribe" in the Subject of the email.

You can unsubscribe from the list by sending an email to <list-name>-unsubscribe@lists.automattic.com with "unsubscribe" in the Subject Field.

Other Community Sites

If you prefer other formats and venues for support other than the WordPress Support Forums, there are several options available, including:

  • WordPress Group on LinkedIn - for WordPress users, developers, and consultants, to connect, and to share ideas, questions, and contacts.
  • WordPress Tavern - according to its About page this "is a site focused on all things WordPress" and "a warm and inviting community" where you can "engage in enlightening discussions". Aside from news and reviews, it also brings screencasts and guest blog posts.
  • WordPress Answers - a free, community driven Q&A for WordPress developers and administrators moderated by an open democratic process.