Open Source Contributions at Automattic

BuddyPress keeps social networking open and distributed. It’s a WordPress plugin that adds profiles, activity streams, groups, and messaging to any WordPress site. Communities, organizations, and educators can build their own social network on their own domain while avoiding the risks and loss of control that come with closed platforms. Automattic backed BuddyPress from the start and sponsored the project through its early years. Today it’s developed by volunteers and powers every member profile on WordPress.org.

Investing in the next generation of contributors is how open source stays healthy long after today’s maintainers move on. That’s why, along with volunteer and sponsored community contributors, we’ve built three community programs that give students a way into open source. Campus Connect brings hands-on WordPress events to universities, Student Clubs turn those events into year-round on-campus communities, and WordPress Credits lets students earn academic credit for contributing 150 hours to the project. Students, educators, and institutions partner with the WordPress Foundation and the wider community to run them, with Automattic contributing sponsored contributor time and mentorship.

Harper is a free, private grammar checker that runs in your browser, code editor, notes app, WordPress, and even on your desktop. As an open source project, it’s built by contributors at Automattic and by the community. And because your writing never touches the cloud, it stays yours.

WordPress.org is where the open source WordPress project lives, from the plugin and theme directories to the support forums and documentation that every WordPress site relies on. Community teams build and maintain it all, and Automattic sponsors contributors, many of them full-time, to work on those teams alongside volunteers. That means plugin submissions get reviewed, forum questions get answered, and the sites themselves stay maintained.

Imagine WordPress running entirely in your browser in seconds. That’s Playground: built on WebAssembly, storing nothing on a server, with the SQLite integration plugin replacing MySQL. Try a theme, test a plugin, or explore a product before committing to anything. Developers get instant demos, QA, JSON Blueprint setups, and apps like WordPress Studio, all running on the same engine. And with my.wordpress.net it becomes a private WordPress instance nobody else can see. All free, open source, and built in the open by full-time contributors Automattic sponsors—alongside volunteers from across the WordPress community.

Manage your WordPress site on the go with the WordPress Mobile Apps. From quick edits or checking your stats to managing every aspect of your site, you get the full power of the Block Editor in your pocket. Automattic’s mobile engineers build them in public, publish them on the App Store and Google Play, and ship regular releases, with contributions welcome from anyone. Available on iOS and Android.

WP Job Manager helps communities and companies own (not rent) their recruiting process. A plugin for creating job boards on WordPress sites, it’s used by companies, recruiters, and niche communities to post and manage their job listings. Organizations running their own job boards get a flexible system that integrates with their WordPress site instead of relying on external job platforms. Automattic has maintained WP Job Manager as free, open source software since 2015. The team ships regular releases and security fixes, keeps the plugin working with each new version of WordPress, and develops it in the open on GitHub, where anyone can contribute code or translations.