One of the benefits of using open source software like WordPress is that (if you choose) you can lend a hand to help make it better. That may mean contributing code, reporting bugs, testing releases, documentation, making it more accessible to those with disabilities, etc. It also means that thousands of other users and developers contribute their time to making it better every day (the fruits of which you can auto-update to, for free).
With the recent release of WordPress 4.6 (code-named “Pepper”) Michael Moore became a core contributor as well — which means we just hit 50% of the web team* (and are aiming for 100% in the next 6-12 months) as core contributors.
The bug report Michael submitted fixes a bug in the MySQL table creation function WordPress uses (dbdelta), which now allows for spatial indexes — which makes faster geo (location) based queries possible. He found the issue while developing a plugin we’re working on called WP GeoMeta to add true geo-spatial support to WordPress, something we hope may make it into core… someday?
* I had a core contribution back in 4.4 (and a bug report fixed in 3.7).
Nick Ciske – CTO / CISO
Nick has a degree in Multimedia Design and over 20 years of experience working in web development and digital media. In his career he’s built or rebuilt just about every kind of website, including many content management systems (before WordPress), several custom e-commerce systems, and hundreds of websites.