Contributing To WordPress Via Support

 

Helping with Support on WordPress.org is one of the quickest, easiest, and possibly rewarding ways to give back. You directly and immediately impact people’s projects and sometimes livelihood. Come see how easy it is.

Transcription:

Hey folks! Welcome to another HeroPress Tip of the Week. This week I’m going to show you how easy it is to contribute to WordPress on the support team. Recently, somebody asked me, what’s one of the easiest ways to get involved? And one of the answers was the support team. So let’s take a look. 

We’re here at wordpress.org, we’re going to go to “learn” and then “forums”. So these are the forums for the support area. They’re divided into a variety of different areas. There’s some forums just for installing, just for fixing broken WordPress, just for developing, etc. 

But my favorite place to look is, at the very bottom of this page there’s a link right here that says topics with no replies. These are questions that have not gotten any response at all and people are anxiously awaiting to hear from anyone about their question. 

The depth of knowledge required here varies widely. You might get something that requires very little knowledge—just you can be on your first day at WordPress, and answer your question perfectly. And there are some that are way beyond me and I just, hey, I hope smarter people than me get through them. But the whole range is there. They’re easy to get to. 

There’s usually about 20 on this page. It’s about what there’s now. Some of them are quite old. There’s one that’s from a couple of from a week ago. And yet, here’s one from just four minutes ago. So you have a wide variety of options to choose from and you can just pick one and answer it. You have to be logged in. I’m currently not, so let’s take care of that. There. Now I’m logged in.

So while we’re here, I’ll show you how quick and easy it is to answer one. Here’s one about putting a flash game in WordPress. Unfortunately, flash isn’t really supported by any browsers these days. So putting a flash game into WordPress isn’t really going to work. 

So we come down here to the bottom, and we can simply start typing. We don’t have a name, so we’ll use their username. I’ll put in hi… There. So I gave him an answer. It’s not what he wanted. Try to be sensitive to that when you’re answering questions for people, sometimes they’re just not going to get what they want and sometimes what they want might cost a lot of money. Like maybe they want something so custom, it’s gonna be quite a bit of development, and you’re gonna have to refer them to an agency, and what they were hoping for was a quick plug-in. Sometimes it just doesn’t work out. So try to be sensitive and be kind. 

I’m going to go ahead and submit this answer. And then if we go back to the page with topics with no answers, you’ll see that it is now gone. Several have appeared in just a few minutes we’ve been doing this. So that’s it. I have now contributed to WordPress by helping out within the support forums. You can do as many or a few as you wish and still be a contributor. I find it personally very rewarding to come in here sometimes and just answer a few questions and make people’s days a little bit better. So if you’re looking for something low-impact on your schedule, give support a try. I hope you find it useful.