Contributing to WordPress
I attended WordCamp Seattle last week, and the day after the conference I went to my first contributor day. First off; it was lots of fun. Everyone was super friendly and willing to explain how things work. No judgement for not knowing how some things work, or the process to go through to do a particular task.
As Andrew Nacin had said in his keynote speech the day before; members of the WordPress community want new people to be interested and get involved. And people at the contribution day certainly had the right attitude in achieving that.
I was a little disheartened, however, though it was nobody’s fault. I’ve been very interested in contributing to WordPress Core for a while now, but the vast majority (not all) of open trac tickets require technical knowledge above me. Still, I vowed to keep developing my skills and have a more active role there in the future. I still had some hours to kill at the contributor day, though, so I had a look at the other areas I could help out.
- First up is the WP.org support forums. I spent over a year in my current job as the resident bug fixer, so I answered as many “How to and Troubleshooting” questions as I could. I now actively head back every few days or so to help out where I can.
- After that was documentation for the Codex. It was mentioned that people using a function for the first time are often the best as explaining it. Even with that in mind, I didn’t find anything to update, but it’s something I’m keeping in mind as time moves on.
- The next thing I looked at was helping with Handbooks. Like the Codex, these will change as the web changes and as WordPress changes. So I added this as well to my list of things to help out with in the future.
With all that in mind, there’s still more you can do to help! So I suggest heading to http://make.wordpress.org/ and seeing what you can do to keep WordPress going. If you’re not sure how to begin, I’d heartily recommend attending a WordCamp contributor day if you can; the people there will be more than happy to get you started.