The WordPress Contributor Dashboard pilot is now live, mapping contributor activity across Make WordPress teams into a contributor ladder framework. The dashboard is intended to help the community better understand how contributors get involved and grow over time.
The Origin
Kel Santiago-Pilarski announced the project back in December 2025. She highlighted what the team was building and what the goal was, “The goal is to help teams understand participation patterns, identify where support may be needed, and improve contributor experiences over time.”
The contributor dashboard effort traces back to a 2024 experiment led by Hari Shanker R, Courtney Robertson, Naoko Takano, and Isotta Peira, following a call by Matt Mullenweg at WordCamp Europe 2023 for project health dashboards.
How the Contributor Dashboard Works
The Contributor Dashboard is basically a plugin, that tracks activity across Make WordPress teams and organizes it within a Contributor Ladder framework representing different stages of participation.
It processes contribution data through a three-layer system, where raw activity events are aggregated into contributor profiles that generate the dashboard. The pilot is being developed by a small group of contributors from across the project, including Kel Santiago-Pilarski, Dion Hulse, Francesco Di Candia, Juan Hernando, and Felipe Velzani.
The Various Stages of the Contributor Ladder
Currently, there are 5 ladder stages, which group activity into stages that reflect how contributors become involved and progress with time, and they are:
- Connect
- Contribute
- Engage
- Perform
- Lead
Exploring the Dashboard
The dashboard gives insights into total contribution, the total number of contributors, one-time contributors, and much more.
The “Contributor Progression” section in the dashboard shows data for the first three stages of the contributor ladder for now.
- Connect – The initial stage of the ladder has various triggers, such as creating a forum reply, contributing a translation, and more.
- Contribute – The second stage is reached when the contributor has created more than 5 replies, 5 translation suggestions, and so on.
- Engage – This stage requires the contributor to have at least five approved translations, two or more Slack props, and various other triggers.
A demo video explaining the dashboard has been provided by Felipe Velzani.
What’s coming in Phase Two
Kel Santiago-Pilarski has highlighted two features that are being considered for the next phase of the dashboard.
The first is “Team-managed personas”, which would allow individual Make WordPress teams to define contributor personas with their own ladders and requirements, reflecting the different ways teams operate, as highlighted, “ Different teams contribute in different ways, one ladder doesn’t fit all. Team reps can define and manage these personas, and contributors can appear on multiple ladders based on their activity across teams.”
The second is “ Automated Engagement”, would automatically recognize contributors when they reach key milestones. These milestones could trigger acknowledgments such as messages, props, or even swag from the official WordPress’s swag store, The Mercantile.
Kel has called for community feedback on the proposed features, asking contributors to help identify which one would deliver the most value and suggest additional ideas, “ If we had to start with one of these two, which would provide the most value? Are any other things not considered that you think should be implemented and/or could bring a lot of value?”.
Feedback is requested by March 17, 2026, ahead of work on the next phase of the project. Interested folks can get involved by joining the #contributor-dashboard Slack channel, commenting on the post, and also engaging with the project’s GitHub repository.