Contributing to WordPress or other open source projects can be intimidating for first-time contributors. Sometimes, all you need is a helping hand to overcome fear, intimidation, or other barriers. In 2013, with the help of Konstantin Obenland, a WordPress core developer, I overcame my fear and contributed my first patch to WordPress. This is one of…
Discourse is free, open-source discussion software created by Jeff Atwood in 2013. In addition to celebrating its fourth birthday, the team announced the Discourse Encouragement Fund. The fund allows the development team to pay contributors for critical work. In the course of a year, Discourse has paid 16 different developers a total of $17,000 to work…
I know a lot of people in the community who got their start answering questions in the WordPress support forums. It’s one of the easiest ways to contribute back to the project without having to touch code. If you’re interested in helping others in the support forums, check out the first global contributor drive on January…
Open source projects often struggle with finding practical ways to recognize contributors. Although most contributors aren’t in it for the recognition, it’s nice for project leaders to have a way to showcase who is behind the work. The relative number of contributors on a project is often a good indicator of how many people are…
It wasn’t long ago when I could count the number of core WordPress committers on one hand. These days, it’s hard to keep track of who does and doesn’t have access. In fact, some developers are getting temporary access for release cycles to work on specific features. I remember in 2010, community member DD32 or…
For the second year in a row, WordPress advent calendar will be hosting their WordPress Snippets til Christmas campaign. Started in 2012, the WordPress Snippets til Christmas features a number of useful WordPress code snippets from members of the community. Submissions for 2013 are now open and don’t have to specifically deal with the Advent…
Dion Hulse also known as DD32 recently celebrated his birthday (happy belated birthday!) and in a recent blog post announced that he is looking for additional contributors to his plugins. According to Dion, his plugins are about to reach the 110,000 download mark in total and is concerned that if a security issue comes up…