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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?

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WordPress

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