Become A WordPress Contributor In 1 Day Or Less! No code! No Design Skills!

 

Have you ever wanted to be a WordPress project contributor, but felt like you couldn’t, because you don’t know how to code and you’re not a designer? I’ll show you around a dozen different ways you can contribute, across a wide variety of skills. Many of them can get you a contributor badge in one day!

Transcription

Hey folks, welcome to another HeroPress Tip of the Week. Recently, I put out on Twitter a call for ideas for this, for this series. And somebody said, “I would like to contribute to WordPress. But I don’t know how to code. And I don’t know how to design, what can I do to help?” So this video is going to give you a brief survey of some of the things that you can do. We’re here at wordpress.org, and right at the top is a Community menu item. And we’re going to start at Make WordPress.

And this is the page that lists all the different teams of volunteers that helped make WordPress. And there are quite a few of them. We’re going to start at the top. And we’re going to skip the first two, because this is code. And this is design. And that’s not what we’re here for. Mobile is actually mostly code also. But you might fit in there, there’s some user interface things, you could do some testing of products and say, Look, you know, this doesn’t work for me or whatever. But mobile might not be for you either. If you’re not into code or design, accessibility is a good one. This is about making webpages accessible to people who might have issues with vision or hearing or using their hands, or anything, anything that could make it different from everybody else that uses the web. Now, before I go too much farther, I want to point out that these teams all have regular meetings, and you can just show up in Slack. And there’s information on this website, on how to get on the make WordPress Slack. But you can show up to the meeting. And I recommend just not saying anything for a couple of meetings and just seeing how things go.

Next is polyglots. If you speak any language other than English, you can log into a very simple web form, and translate both WordPress core and themes and plugins. And it’s super easy. There’s a literally just filling out a form. And the title of this is how to become a contributor in less than a day. You can log in and change one string and become a contributor, and you will get a little badge on your profile on wordpress.org. In minutes, it’s really that simple. So if you speak a language other than English polyglots may be for you. Support. It’s just going to the forums on wordpress.org and answering questions. And not all the questions are big and complex. Some of them are pretty simple. Some are like “how do I log in?” “How do I make a post?” “What’s the difference between a post and a page?” Very common normal questions. And you can go in and just answer a whole bunch of them and totally make somebody’s day. I really like being on the support team, because people are really appreciative when somebody answers their question. It doesn’t matter if it’s a simple question or not. They don’t know the answer. And you do and you can change their day. And it’s great.

Documentation Are you a writer you like to write, you can write about how to use WordPress, how to use different features, all kinds of stuff. Themes. So this is the theme review team. This is not a theme creation team. When somebody creates a theme, they submit it to wordpress.org and say I’d like this listed. And the theme review team goes through it looking to make sure that it follows a certain set of rules that it meets certain criteria. And it helps to be a coder, but you don’t have to be you can give it an initial initial review and say yes, they have fulfilled all of these bullet points. And then maybe the coder at the end doesn’t have to do all that stuff. And you’ve saved somebody a ton of time. Plugins, same thing. Now this is a little more code heavy. But there are still some things you can do to accelerate the review of plugins.

Community. This is about meetups, word camps, meetings, all that kind of stuff. You can help people start their own meetup or give advice on how to run a meet up or you could learn how to run a meet up. Community is great for getting people together and helping to build WordPress. We’re going to skip meta that’s probably not for you. That’s building wordpress.org training. Training is mostly videos on how to use WordPress. And the training team will make coordinated training videos so that people aren’t repeating themselves and things like that. But if you know how to, to speak into a microphone and you know how to use WordPress, you can probably make a video on how to do something. I’m doing it right this second test. This is a very interesting one for people who might want to be coders but aren’t. Let’s say somebody submits a bug. And then somebody else submits some code to fix that bug. If you’re on the test team, there’s a very simple process to download the code that fixes it. And you can test to say, Yes, I experienced the problem. Now I’ve installed this extra code, and it fixed it or it didn’t fix it, or anything you need to say. And then that’s it, you move on, then it’s up to the people who might be committed to court to decide whether or not this is good code. But you can help say, “Yes, that was a problem, I experienced it, and this code fixed it.” And that’s it, you move on.

wordpress.tv is a site that hosts videos of were kept talks, and a variety of other things. The people on this team, do a variety of things, they can review a video to make sure that it fits the format properly, that it doesn’t have anything inappropriate in it, things like that. You might be editing if you wish, but you don’t have to. It’s a lot of review a lot of moderation. And I’m going to be careful with the word editing. Because there’s video editing, we’re actually chopping up bits of video. But also as an editor, you read through it and say, Okay, this is good content, or this is not good content. And so you you might end up doing some of that. There’s the marketing team that promotes WordPress, in a variety of ways in a variety of places. If you’re in the marketing, it’s a good place for you.

CLI probably not so much for you, if you’re not a coder hosting, we work to improve WordPress end user experience, across hosting environments through Industry Collaboration and user education. So let’s say you’ve used a variety of hosts, and you have opinions and you know people and you can help people communicate and learn. This might be a great team for you. Tied is probably not for you if you’re not a coder, open verse, probably also similar but maybe not. This worth joining their team open verse is a search engine that finds openly licensed media. And a lot of what they do is actually write code to make the search engine work. But there’s, I’m sure there’s user interface stuff and all kinds of things. So if open vs important to you, by all means join the meeting, listen in for a little while, ask some questions. And maybe it’s for you.

The photo directory, we’ll get to this one in a few minutes because it has its own listing under community. But wordpress.org/photos is just a repository of freely licensed photos. And if you know how to take a picture and upload it, you can join the team and get a badge in your profile and become a WordPress contributor simply by taking a picture and uploading it. Core performance. This one sort of skirts the edge of being a coder or not. You can run tests without being a coder at all. They say you know, we need to know how long it takes such and such to happen. And here’s how to run that test. And you load up a web page you start a timer, you run the page, you stop the timer, you tell them how long it took. Now, those people are going to do a lot of stuff with coding to to fix that sort of thing. But they absolutely need those testers. They absolutely need people who are not coders to be doing a lot of things. So that’s the bottom of that page. This is the make WordPress page under community. But also there’s WordCamp. Now WordCamps are relatively small events. There are some large ones but most of them are small in a single city with a few 100 people. And it’s a one day maybe two day event about we’re best in general and you might hear a topics or you might hear talks on how to use WordPress How to Build WordPress, how to market, how to make a company what to do when you’re burned out as a freelancer. It’s not all about the code or design or anything. Now, WordCamps always need volunteers to make them happen. So if you want a word camp in your city, this is where you can learn how to do that. If you want to volunteer to work camp that’s near you. You can pick one. Let’s see one that’s not happening right now. We’re camp Torino. If you go to visit website, we’ll switch to English because I don’t speak Italian. And I don’t think that helped. Oh, yes, it did. Call for volunteers. And you can go be a volunteer at work camp. And that could be anything from standing at the front door and shaking hands as they come in, all the way up to making sure all the speakers are know where they’re going and what they’re saying and what room they’re talking just a wide variety of things. Volunteers usually get a free ticket. So there’s a lot of advantages to volunteering at work camp. But this is another way that you can volunteer or you can contribute to WordPress.

Next under community is meetups. Every red.is a meetup in a city somewhere in the world. And these happen approximately once a month. And you may find one in your city. And you could volunteer Oh, look, here’s one in Cambridge, you could volunteer to help. You could create what in your own city. The your options for meetups are, are really varied. So I recommend coming here and connect you connect with your local meetup, find out what’s going on, what do they need, maybe nothing, maybe this isn’t for you. But chances are high that they can use something.

Next on this list is the photo directory which we talked about. So all of these photos are licensed under the Creative Commons. And they have CC0, which means that they have no rights reserved. You can use them for anything. You can put them on your website, you can put them on a billboard, you can use them for anything at all. And right here, it says contribute your own photos. If you’re logged into wordpress.org, you can upload up to five at a time, unlimited as they’re moderated. You just put up a photo, you give it a description, and you agree to these rules. And once you’ve submitted a photo, you become a photos contributor, WordPress contributor, as soon as by Florian Ziegler. And if we look at florins wordpress.org profile. Then you’ll see right here is photo contributor and so Florian got that badge. And if you have any badge, you are a contributor. Next, we’re going to skip the job board that was not so much about contributing, but look at Five for the Future.

A few years ago, one of the cofounders of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg put forth the idea that if you make your living with WordPress, then you should probably give back somehow, because WordPress is free, and you’re making your living off something for free. And he suggested 5%. So five for the future is 5% of your time giving back to WordPress. And it can be any of these things that I’ve talked about. But down at the bottom of the page, it says I’m an individual interested in participating, you can get involved, or I am part of an organization interested in participating. And you can get involved. And you get an official page listed on this site. Let’s see some pledges from organizations destech, the mile nerves web design, chamfer, dealio, DreamHost, Awesome Motive, rtCamp. My own employer WebDev Studios is on this list. And once a month, our entire company spends an entire day doing nothing but contributing back. And it’s fun. It’s like a community thing. Our whole company works together and we have a meeting at the beginning of the day to say what we’re going to work on and a meeting at the end of the day to see what we accomplished. And it’s really fun. So, you can do this either as a company or as a person if you’re interested in giving 5% of your time. Check out five for the future.

So let’s see in this video. All of it has revolved around this one menu in wordpress.org under Community. And there are dozens of ways maybe hundreds to give back to WordPress and I’d like to point out that these are only the official ways. If you want to do something else, you totally can I run a community service called Hero press. You’re watching your first video right now, you’ll note that your press is not under this. It’s just something I do because I like to you back. So you can do really anything you want to further the WordPress community, the project the story and have it if you are doing something, I would love to hear about it. Comment, wherever you’re seeing this whether it’s on YouTube or the website, or whatever, how are you getting back to WordPress. I hope you find this useful.