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Community Events Open Source WordPress

The WordPress Melbourne User Group: a 1200 day history and a look into the future

The History

In June 2010, Andrew Davis, Anthony Cole and myself met with the idea of reinvigorating the (then defunct) WordPress Melbourne User Group.

The discussions went well, and the following month we hosted the first meeting (which had 8 people in attendance).

1202 days later, I’m immensely proud to say that we have organised 47 WordPress Melbourne User Group meetup events (an average of 1.2 events per month), all of which have helped WordPress users learn and share their knowledge about WordPress and related topics.

The Thank You’s

I’d like to extend a sincere thank you to the following people and companies, who have all played a big part in making WPmelb a success.

The sponsors (past and present):

The venues (past and present):

The organisers (past, present and future):

The regular volunteers (past and present):

The speakers:

  • There have been in excess of 60 volunteer speakers (too many to list unfortunately).

The members and community:

  • Countless people have come along to our events to expand or contribute their knowledge
  • These people have also helped spread the word about the group, and encouraged their friends to join and attend.

As of today, we are lucky enough to have almost 1000 members.

Without all of you the user group would be meaningless.

Thank you.

The Future

With my impending move to Perth, tonight will be the last WPmelb event I attend for a while.

I’ve also stepped down as lead organiser, and I feel confident knowing that a talented and awesome team of volunteer organisers will be ensuring that the group grows and prospers into the future!

It’s been fantastic being a part of the WordPress Melbourne User Group over the last 3 and a half years.

I’ve met so many great people, learnt so many things, and had countless opportunities to share some of my knowledge with others.

If you live in or near Melbourne, and are interested in WordPress, I strongly recommend that you join the friendly group and come along to an event.

Categories
Community WordPress

How to Get Involved in the WordPress Project

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?