Recently at WordCamp Melbourne, Ryan McCue said the following to all attendees:
If everyone simply contributed just one thing to the WordPress project, then WordPress would be infinitely better.
Ryan McCue
Please pause, and think about that for a second.
Going back a few years, there seemed to be a heavy focus on core code being the primary way to contribute to the WordPress open source project.
However in recent times, I’ve noticed a lot of effort has been put into helping the community contribute to the project in other ways (such as documentation, events, or support).
The WordPress Foundation has recently posted a great summary on how you can get involved in the WordPress project.
Regardless of whether you’re using WordPress for business or personal reasons, I strongly suggest you have a read of the article, which lists these teams/areas that you can get involved in:
- Accessibility
- Community
- Core (testing, bug reporting, code wrangling)
- Documentation
- Events (WordCamps, meetups, etc)
- Meta (wordpress.org)
- Mobile ((iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry apps)
- Polygots (translations)
- Plugins
- Support
- Themes
- UI (user interface design & development)
- Updates (news / blog posts)
In my case, so far I have helped out with WordPress core (bug reporting & fixing), documentation, events, plugins, suport and updates.
However I haven’t been contributing as much as I would like to. I’ve only used six of the thirteen ways that I could be contributing, so there’s definitely still room for improvement!
How are you planning on contributing to the WordPress project?
