You may use WordPress every day to maintain your website and build your presence online, but did you know there is a dedicated team of developers, designers, and authors who build and maintain the core of WordPress? If you want to know who they are check out the About Page @ WordPress.org. WordPress also has a pretty substantial and helpful community of plugin developers, theme designers, bug reporters, and patch testers that work solely for the improvement of WordPress as a Content Management System. Contributing to the WordPress project can be done in many ways, but here are 5 ways that I think you can help improve WordPress. These are simply ways that don’t take much time, and I would suggest that if you found this product helpful, you try and contribute as much as possible to help improve the product that has made you successful.
Submit a valid Bug Report with proper information
I’ve been in the Software Development business for a while now and one thing I can’t stand is a bug report that’s either invalid or doesn’t have enough detail so that I can easily reproduce it. Supplying the development team with good steps to replicate a bug that you have identified helps them quickly and properly fix it. Don’t just try the bug on your own installation, try it on a development installation you have, see if it happens in the previous version, etc. I typically will try the following things to identify a bug in the core:
- Turn off all plugins
- Use the stock WordPress Twenty Eleven Theme
- Try it on the Current Version, Previous Version, and Nightly release
- Try in multiple browsers and versions on Mac OS X and Windows 7
- Try with a user from every privilege group (if it seems related to a role)
A while ago Andrew Nacin (one of the Core Contributors) tweeted the following link (http://t.co/nIyMYmy):
Contribute in the forums at WordPress.org
Everyday there are hundreds of new users installing WordPress. At one point in time, you were just like them (or may be that person now). Well there’s a great solution for finding information from the WordPress community itself… WordPress.org/Support. Here you can submit and view Forum Topics related to WordPress, it’s themes and plugins, and overall usage of the platform. The two sections I find most people need help in are in the ‘How-To and Troubleshooting’ and ‘Installation’ threads. If you have experience with WordPress, stop in and help out a user or two.
Develop a Theme or Plugin and host it on WordPress.org
There are plenty of premium content houses out there developing fantastic plugins and themes for WordPress, but WordPress itself is free and open-source. If you appreciate that philosophy, what better way than to provide a free and open-source addition to the CMS platform. Hosting a theme or plugin on WordPress.org requires that it be free (as there is no payment methods on WordPress.org). You supply your product free of charge and they will host it for you. If you want to contribute in this matter, you can use the ‘Extend’ section of WordPress.org: wordpress.org/extend
Participate in the WordPress IRC Channel
Remember IRC or Internet Relay Chat? Yeah, it’s still around, and WordPress still uses it to hold meetings and in general help with connecting the WordPress Community with each other. You can hop onto the IRC Server irc.freenode.net and join #wordpress and instantly be in the chat room with other WordPress users, and the occasional WordPress developer. Personally I’ve been on this channel a few times and in once case spent an hour working with an individual who was locked out of their WordPress site. I helped walk him through the process of resetting his account (the email address wasn’t valid any longer) and getting access to his site. It’s a rewarding feeling and the user was sure thankful.
Test a WordPress Patch
This one is a little more on the advanced side of the tips. When a bug report is sent into the ‘Trac’ (at core.trac.wordpress.org) it goes through the basic process of being Accepted, Corrected in a Patch, Tested, and Committed to a nightly. The nightly is then built into a versioned release. The patches mentioned are supplied either by another WordPress user with development experience or a Core Contributor/Core Developer. These patches are ones you can install into the current version of WordPress, a beta version, a release candidate, or a nightly version. If you apply the patch and it fixes what the issue was with the bug, you can state that it was successful for you and mark it as such in the comments. The more testing that is done, the better. Testing a patch is helpful to the community as it helps keep the quality of the updates being made at a high level.
Those are 5 ways I think users of any level can offer to contribute back to the WordPress open-source project.
What ways are you currently giving back to this community?
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for the great post..nice
@Amit
No problem Amit. Appreciate the comment. I just visited your site and it looks like you have some good content. Will have to bookmark you.
Cheers!
Nice post, I’ll try to submit bugs. I’ll try to contribute WordPress as I love WordPress.
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