In this interview, Bernie Reiter shares his journey into the WordPress community, starting with his first WordPress blog in 2006. As one of the Editor Tech leads for WordPress 6.1 and a Core Committer, Bernhard has contributed to projects focused on enhancing the developer experience, including the Block Hooks and Interactivity APIs. He reflects on the evolution of WordPress development, highlighting the future of script modules and PHP enhancements, and offers advice for new developers looking to get involved in the community.
Can you share your first experience with WordPress, and what made you choose it?
I started my first WordPress blog in the summer of 2006 because I needed some way of documenting my progress on a software project that I was working on at the time. I was loosely following some blogs and became aware of WordPress when a bunch of them moved off Movable Type due to the latter’s controversial change in licensing. The stars kind of aligned: My university had only recently enabled PHP and MySQL for the free webspace that it provided to all students.
How did you start contributing to open-source projects, and what was your first contribution to the WordPress community?
For me, it was the typical “scratch an itch” kind of contributions to Open Source Software (OSS) at first: I would use some software and discover a bug or a missing feature, try to familiarize myself with the codebase and set up the build system — those were typically the hardest parts — and finally submit a patch. The first time I did this was for a LaTeX editor called LyX that I was using for my studies; back then, code was kept in CVS repositories, and code review happened via email. It would take me another couple of years before I became active in the WordPress community, first by asking questions in the Plugins forum, and eventually contributing code to some plugins. One of the earliest traces that I left in Core was by reopening this ticket, albeit with a comment whose somewhat passive-aggressive tone I now find embarrassing 
(Also, capital P, dang it!)
What are some important projects or contributions you have made within the WordPress ecosystem?
I was one of the Editor Tech leads for WordPress 6.1 and became a Core Committer soon after. Since then, I’ve been largely focused on the Developer Experience of WordPress: I’m the principal author of the Block Hooks API, and I’ve contributed code and reviews to the HTML and Interactivity APIs.
What are your thoughts on the current state of WordPress development, and how do you see its future?
I’m pretty excited about Script Modules in WordPress, as they allow writing modern JavaScript with a dependency system for the client side without the overhead of a build chain. As we gradually see WordPress JS dependencies become available as script modules, it’s nice to think that JavaScript development might once again become as straight-forward as writing PHP. For a practical example, script modules are used by the Interactivity API – the first standardized framework for client-side interactivity available in Core, something worth highlighting in its own right.
On the PHP side, I’m looking forward to the day when the minimum required PHP version in WordPress will be one that’s still also supported by the PHP Foundation, enabling us to use “modern” language constructs and features. I’m happy to see that some fellow Core Committers have been actively engaging with the PHP community, in order to suggest new features and extensions for PHP (e.g. `decode_html` or WASM) that would be beneficial to both the language, and to WordPress as one of the biggest projects that use it.
How do you keep up with the latest trends in WordPress development, and what resources would you suggest for new developers who want to get involved?
There are a lot of great resources out there, but I’d like to especially highlight the Developer Blog and the Developer Hours series that’s part of the Learn WordPress Online Workshops. The latter is also recorded and available on WordPress.tv and Youtube. Since the folks that are writing the blog posts and hosting the workshops are very close to Core development, it’s a great way of staying up to date with new features and APIs in WordPress soon after they’re first released.
