Rene Hermenau (@renehermi) – WordPress user profile

Bio

WordPress developer based in Northern Germany. Founder of WP STAGING —
the staging, backup, and migration plugin running on more than 100,000
WP sites.

Building WordPress infrastructure since 2013. Started WP STAGING because
I kept hitting the same problem on client work: there was no reliable
way to clone a WordPress site for testing or migration without breaking
serialized data, file paths, or media references. The free plugin is
still maintained alongside the Pro version that handles full backups,
multisite, and large database migration at scale.

Hands-on with the codebase, writing the docs at wp-staging.com/docs,
and reading every issue on GitHub (github.com/wp-staging). Always
interested in WordPress edge cases that broke a staging or backup tool
you’ve used — those are usually the bugs worth fixing.

“When you touch code, leave it 10% better than before. And write a test.”

Badges

CODE

2 badges

Core Contributor '20 Plugin Developer

PRACTICE

1 badge

Support Contributor '26

POLYGLOTS

2 badges

Translation Contributor '16 Translation Editor '16

Current Job

Founder

Present

WP STAGING

Recent impact

Score weights high-impact work (commits, releases, approved translations, props) at 3x routine activity.

Last 30 days

26contributions

high10

medium16

score46

Last 90 days

47contributions

high21

medium26

score89

Last 12 months

89contributions

high41

medium48

score171

Team focus

Share of contributions across teams during the last 365 days

WordPress releases

Contributed to 4 releases

Time commitment

1 hour per week of sponsored contribution time

WP STAGING

Contributions

Type

November 2026

Nov 13 Fri · 18:57

Forums med

Posted a reply to Can’t log into WP Staging site after lastest WordPress update, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
@thewatcher2 Yes, 4.21.0 fixes part of it. The rest is merged and ships in the…

Nov 13 Fri · 18:41

Meta med

Wrote a comment on the post Introducing Mētis, Our New Flagship Theme, on the site Make WordPress Core:
Looking at it again, I think the main UX issue is that the theme toggle…

Nov 13 Fri · 18:35

Meta med

Wrote a comment on the post Introducing Mētis, Our New Flagship Theme, on the site Make WordPress Core:
A memorable name and a modern, impressive design. I really like the first impression! One…

Nov 13 Fri · 01:50

Forums med

Created a topic, Release Notes for WP Staging 4.21.0, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
WP Staging 4.21.0 is out. This release opens the st…

Nov 13 Fri · 01:35

Plugins high

Committed [3799522] to Plugins SVN:
Update to version 4.21.0 from GitHub

Nov 12 Thu · 21:34

Core high

Mentioned in [65440] on WordPress SVN:
Rewrite Rules: Always redirect random content requests.

Nov 12 Thu · 20:39

Forums med

Posted a reply to Can’t log into WP Staging site after lastest WordPress update, on the site WordPress.org Forums:
@thewatcher2 The fix is done and tested, but not in tonight’s release, it ships in…

Nov 12 Thu · 19:32

Core med

Submitted pull request #15957 to WordPress/wordpress-develop:
Build/Test Tools: Measure wp-admin in the browser and check performance budgets

Nov 12 Thu · 19:30

Core med

Created ticket #66685 on Core Trac:
Performance tests: measure wp-admin in the browser and flag pull ...

Nov 11 Wed · 13:13

Core med

Created ticket #66662 on Core Trac:
Random content redirect should not combine with search (?s=…&random)