Complete Guide To Contributing To WordPress

Siobhan McKeown has published what many in the community are calling the most thorough, researched, guide on contributing to WordPress. Articles like these pop up from time to time because the WordPress project is ever-evolving. Just a few years ago, contributing to the WordPress project outside of writing code was not as straightforward as it could have been. Within the past 2 years, a lot has changed and now, UI people, designers, writers, testers, can all contribute their small part in an easy, structured way thanks to the various Make.WordPress blogs. Those that are passionate about writing now have the community driven handbooks to contribute to. Those that are passionate about the mobile publishing experience can get involved with the mobile team. It’s great to see the project branch out to make it as easy as possible to get as many different people contributing.

“Don’t ever feel that just because you don’t know how to code like Nacin and Otto that you’re not just as valuable as they are. Because without us, too, WordPress would fall apart. A healthy community is healthy on all levels, and everybody does know that.”

I love that quote by Mika Epstein. As for my own contributions, I’ve never written any code for WordPress or contributed any patches. However, through the WPTavern website as well as the forum, I’ve been able to contribute in various ways such as publishing information about a bug I’ve run into, thoughts and opinions on how certain things should work, addition and subtraction of features in the core, etc. In at least one instance, I published an article that complained about the fact that within the WordPress back-end, users were limited to only seeing 20 posts, comments, pages, at a time. I wanted an easy way to change that. Thanks to Peter Westwood, one of the later versions of WordPress introduced that enhancement to the Screen Options drop down tab.

So at the end of the day, folks are running out of excuses as to why they can’t contribute to WordPress.