Maintaining an open source project as big as jQuery requires the use of various software and services. Two of the products we rely on and enjoy the most are GitHub and WordPress.

We’ve been using and loving Git and GitHub for years now. The community collaboration has been phenomenal. We’ve seen a massive uptick in community-provided bug fixes, refactors, new features, etc. Even within the team, the services provided by GitHub have provided a huge productivity boost. Forks and pull requests provide a great mechanism for sharing code and peer code reviews. The interface renders almost every file exactly how we want it to, especially Markdown. The API and service hooks provide a great way to automate various tasks.

Even longer than we’ve been using GitHub, we’ve been using WordPress to manage our various web sites. We have a surprisingly large number of them. Between project sites, API documentation, tutorials, contribution guides, events, and organization sites, the number of web sites we maintain rivals the number of code projects we maintain. WordPress provides tools which make managing this many sites with a common brand almost as simple as maintaining just one site with shared users, theme inheritance, and a great plugin architecture, providing even more hooks than GitHub.