On today’s episode, we talk about different ways to contribute to WordPress. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Your Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin. Today I am here to talk about the different ways that we can contribute to WordPress. There’s a lot of different ways we can get involved with the WordPress community, and really help out the development, overall, of WordPress. But we’ll get to that in just a few minutes.

The first thing I want to tell you about is the webinar that’s coming up for November 6. That is going to be at 12 noon Eastern. That’s November 6. We’re going to be talking about how to restore a site from a backup. I know this was a topic that came in. I was like, “Wow, that’s a really good topic.” I talk all the time, I preach all the time, about backing up our websites, making sure that we have a backup.

But the backup solutions are not really that intuitive to actually restore a site from backup. So we’re going to primarily focus on BackWPup, the free plugin that’s out there. But we’ll also maybe dive in a little bit of BackupBuddy, and maybe a little bit of the VaultPress plugin by Automatic. So we’ll look at those different things, and the different ways that it takes to back up your site.

The big deal is having your site backed up. But it’s another big deal if you need to restore, and you don’t want to have to hire somebody to actually do that. So we’re going to be doing that. That’s what we’re going to talk about. You can register today over at YourWebsiteEngineer.com/webinar. Again, that is on November 6 at 12:00 p.m. Eastern. That’s really all the news that I have for you this week.

I am recording this a week early because I am at the All Company meetup, the Grand Meetup we call it. There’s almost 400 automaticians, all gathered in Park City, Utah. We are learning different things. Some of us are working on projects internally. I’m going to be focusing on learning how to build better code, write better code, contribute to core, things along those lines. That’s the reason why I chose this topic for something that we could talk about this week while I’m there. There’s really no other news, and by next week there should be something new in the WordPress space that we can talk about.

Let’s move on to the “Is there a plugin for that,” section. Today’s plugin I want to talk about is called, “Easy forms for Mail Chimp.” They are calling it the ultimate MailChimp plugin. You can easily build forms for your MailChimp list. You can add them to post, pages, sidebars, and track your subscriber activity. This is actually one of the coolest plugins that I found for MailChimp. MailChimp is a perfect way to get started with an email list because they do have a free plan up until 2000 people. As long as you have less than 2000 people on your list, it is completely free.

You can get started over at MailChimp.com. This is the best plugin that I’ve seen. It connects with your API key so, it pulls in all of the information from MailChimp.com into your WordPress dashboard. So you can see details about your different subscribers. You can build forms right inside of MailChimp. It is really, really, really cool. It has over 20,000 active installs. It is something that a lot of people are using. I highly recommend checking this out if you are using MailChimp for your email list, and you want to just create a little bit more customization when it comes to those online forms that people are signing up to get free stuff from you, when they register on your website. So that is the plugin of the week.

Now the big topic today. We’re going to talk about how to contribute to WordPress. If you are new to this space, or if you’ve been with the WordPress community for a while, you may have heard this statement come out of Matt Mullenweg’s mouth at last year’s WordCamp San Francisco, the State of the Word address. He gives one every single year, giving a recap of what went on with the last year of WordPress: how many versions we had, how many downloads we had, how many people are now using it as part of their business, all this good stuff.

He mentioned in last year’s – he said that “Five for the future” was the premise, if you will. It’s a concept that basically means that companies wanting to give back to the WordPress, they should dedicate five percent of their resources to contributing in some way. So if you think about that, if five percent of your 40-hour work week is a couple hours a week that you should be taking some time to develop, or to contribute back to WordPress Core.

If you look at that latest version that came out, WordPress 4.3, there was a lot of people that spent time, all community time, all time that they just gave back to find bugs, to fix bugs, and really help to develop WordPress 4.3. There’s tons of people who do that. There’s tons of people whose names weren’t even on there that were looking through different things within the WordPress repository. They are helping out in different ways. So today I want to talk about some of those different ways that we can contribute to WordPress.

It’s not an end-all, be-all that you have to contribute to Core, like you have to find a bug, and then you have to patch it. No, that’s not necessarily the only way to contribute to WordPress. We’re going to talk about these. The way I have them arranged are kind of the easiest to the hardest.

The first way is community. The community is the easiest way to contribute back to the WordPress Ecosphere. What you could do is, you could answer questions on the support forum. Have you ever spent a little bit of time trying to debug a problem, and you google, and you say, “My page isn’t loading correctly,” or, “Why doesn’t this work, WordPress?” Then you hit it, and it takes you right to the WordPress forum. Somebody had the exact same question. Somebody else actually answered it, and that answer actually worked for you as well. That’s super helpful.

It spends a little bit of time just coming up with answers, or finding out more information, helping the person debug what may be going on. All of that is public record. People are able to see that for years, and years, and years to help them figure out their own issues on their website. So that’s something easy that you can get started with. If you have a WordPress.org account, then you just sign in. You find a question. You hit reply. You can do it right there.

Especially, it’s really, really helpful if you find the answer to a solution, or a question that’s out there. You find a solution, and there isn’t an answer on a WordPress forum? Then you want to go in; just add that answer. Because someday, somebody’s going to stumble on that, and they’re going to be like, “I wish there was an answer for that post.” So that is the first thing you could do in regards to the community.

Another thing that you could do is you could speak, or you could attend – it really just depends on your comfort level, of course – local WordPress meetup groups. Or if there isn’t one locally, then you could start your own. I know that there is one here in Dayton that happens on the second Thursday of every month. So we try to get together. Sometimes we learn. Sometimes we just network and have a good time, like getting to know each other a little bit better, and their strengths and weaknesses, just over casual conversation, and whatnot. So that’s a great way to just be involved.

If you go to these events, even sometimes the theme of the month is just question and answers. It doesn’t matter your skill level of what you can answer the question. It’s all going to be coming from different experiences that you’ve had with WordPress. So that’s another thing that you could do to get involved with the community.

The third thing that you could do to get involved with the community is attend or speak at a WordCamp event. These are a lot less frequent. They are usually one time a year. They’re a bigger event. There is a little bit of money involved. You have to pay $20.00 to $40.00 to get a ticket to go. But then, in that sense, you can go, and you’re still there to be able to network. You’re still able to answer questions, and hang out with people, and just share what you’re doing with WordPress.

Even just telling other people how you’re using WordPress is just a really good benefit for other people to keep their minds spinning. Like, “Oh, you can do that with WordPress, and you can do that with WordPress?” It’s really, really cool. So that’s another one.

The last way that you can get involved with community is on a personal level. You can teach a friend, or a colleague, or somebody who’s never used WordPress before. Just give them some tips and some how-to’s. Like, “This is how you do this.” Or, “I recommend using this hosting platform.” All of these different things are all ways to contribute back to the WordPress community.

The next thing that you could do is you could actually help with the WordPress Codex or documentation. The WordPress Codex is kind of like Wikipedia, in the fact that anybody that has a user account can just go in, and log in, and make some changes. This is especially vital if something’s out of date. Maybe there are screen shots that are out of date, things along those lines. Those can be updated by anyone, anybody that stumbles upon those pages.

Maybe you could put it as a to-do item that, “Every time that I find a outdated screen shot, I’m going to update that page within the WordPress Codex,” or whatever it may be. There’s tons of things. The Codex is basically the documentation on how WordPress works: how the different functions work, how the different template pages work, how to write a plugin, all those different types of things. Those are all found in the Codex.

Another thing you could do with the Codex, and if English isn’t your native language, or if it’s one of your many languages you have, you can actually help to translate the Codex into different languages. There’s a lot of things happening to try to get WordPress more globalized with different languages, and whatnot. There’s always ways to go in and translate the Codex.

You could also help to translate parts of WordPress itself. When you change the language within WordPress dashboard, there’s some words that just don’t translate because nobody has spent the time to actually translate them. We want to make sure that people are getting that full experience in their native language.

Another thing that you can contribute to is the WordPress handbook. This is a big documentation handbook out there. There’s a Slack channel that talks about it. In the WordPress.org Slack channel, you can talk with, on the Docs Team. They talk all about the channel there, just talks about the different ways they can update documentation and finding out what’s going on. There’s just a lot of things that if you’re interested in the teaching side of things, where, “Okay this isn’t quite right.”

You’re an aesthetics guy, and make sure – you want the WordPress Codex and documentation, everything – to look nice and crisp, and whatnot. This may be a good way for you to contribute to WordPress, as well.

The third way that you could contribute back to WordPress is that you could actually contribute back by uploading your themes, or plugins, to the WordPress repository. Maybe you have a theme that you created. It’s your theme that you use on primarily all your sites, or maybe it’s your own mini-framework, and then you build child themes on top of that. It just does a lot of things. It’s got a lot of integrations built in with a customizer. It’s just a really nice theme, and it’s responsive. People like it. All your clients like it. Maybe you could just upload that to the WordPress.org repository.

It’s not a deal-breaker that lots of people will have your code. That’s actually going to help you tweak your code, and make your code that much better because people are using it on their own sites. They maybe find bugs. They report those bugs, and then you can take those bugs, and you can make your code better, which would be really cool, and just a neat way for you to give back to the community.

But then you can also learn in that whole series of events. When somebody reports a bug, you can figure out how to fix it. Then you can push those changes out, both to the repository, and to your clients. It’s kind of a cool little thing that you can do, and it does allow you to learn more about WordPress, itself, because then you have to figure out how to publish, how to update it, and all those different types of things. So that’s a good way that you can do that.

Another thing is maybe you have some custom plugins that you’ve created, and you use them on every single site. They’ve got some sort of functionality that you were never able to find on the WordPress repository. There’s tens of thousands of plugins there. You could upload that plugin to the repository.

The same thing that’s true for this plugin as it does for themes. You get your code out there. People will see it. Maybe people will start using it. Maybe it will clash, or conflict, with some of the other plugins. It will help you to make that plugin better, and just learn how to make sure that your plugin works well with all versions of WordPress, and different themes, and plugins, and things like that. So that is pretty cool as well. When you’re in this mindset, you can also provide support for your theme, or your plugin. That’s another way to contribute back.

Maybe you use a certain plugin all the time. Maybe you use the one that we talked about earlier, the Easy Forms for MailChimp. You can provide support, or you can answer people’s questions if you see fit, inside of that plugins repository. There’s always a support area within each plugin. You can actually answer questions in there. You don’t necessarily have to be the developer to answer specific questions about a theme, or a plugin. So that’s another way that you could give back, and really get yourself involved with the WordPress Ecosphere.

The last way that you could get involved – and this is the hardest way, of course – is into WordPress Core. That is every developer’s dream. It may not be everybody’s dream. But it was my dream for a while. I really wanted to get my name in the, “helped with this version.” I got lucky, and was able to find a bug that somebody else reported, but then I actually added the bug. I put it into Track. That’s the first thing you do. If you find some sort of bug, whether it be with a default theme, like 2012, 2013, 2015, 2016, whatever, or with WordPress itself, if you find some sort of bug, you can add it to Track.

We’re not going to talk a lot about how Track works, but basically Track is the bug-tracking system that WordPress uses. So before you add your bug, you want to go, and you want to just do a quick search to make sure that nobody else has reported the exact same thing. Then you go in and you can add, “Okay, this is what I did. This is the results that I expected. This is what actually happened.” Include screen shots and different things. Then that will allow people to dig in, and try to figure out what may be going wrong. So that’s a neat way to do that.

So adding Track tickets – and how you do that is, you actually will have to install the beta version of WordPress. You have to go in. There’s a plugin called, “The WordPress beta plugin.” Then you can run a “nightly edge release,” is it is called. That gives you the ability to get 4.4 – right now it’s in beta, or in alpha it’s 4.4 alpha, whatever. You can go ahead, and start running that, if you’d like to see what kind of stuff is out there in those newest versions.

Then what you can do is, when you’re doing that, when you’re running that with newest versions, you can run that with your themes, with your plugins, with your site setups, and all these different things, to try to find things that just don’t work right. Maybe it’s an alignment thing. Maybe it’s just text. There’s been – some people they get their very first Core release, or Core patch, and it was just like a comment – what needed was typed incorrectly, like it had a spelling error, or something like that. It’s super basic. But there’s a lot of things that you can do to contribute back to WordPress, using that WordPress Track ticket.

The next thing that you can do is you can actually contribute to Core. So once you find the bugs, then you can fix the bugs, and then you can send the actual code that could be fixed within the Track ticket itself. So the way that it works is, what happens is, you open a Track ticket. You put it in where the bug is. Then anybody has the ability to go in, and look at all those Track tickets, and try to figure out, “Hey do I know a fix? Can I write the code to fix this particular bug?”

One of the cool things is, you can actually look for a tag called, “Newbie,” or “Good for beginner.” There’s a tag something along those lines, or “Good for first-timer.” I can’t remember what it is exactly, but it’s something along those lines. It’s a super basic bug. It’s basically to allow you to figure out, “Okay, how do I get the code? How do I create the diff file? How do I do all of these things to submit a patch to WordPress?” So that’s something else you can do. You can find the bugs and then you can fix them. That’s super difficult to find easy bugs, or even hard bugs. There are some bugs that have taken years, and years, and years to actually get a resolution into WordPress.

Then you can always test those newest versions of WordPress. All you have to do is install that beta plugin, and then go through, and play with things, tinker with things. You basically open up the dashboard. You make the dashboard screen wider and smaller on your page. You see if things are responding right. You see if the colors work. You just kind of test, and you play around with it. With hundreds of people testing it all at the same time, you’re going to find different variances of different things that are going to work just right, and won’t work just right. So those things are things that you can report.

If you ever have a question, you can just join the Slack channel. It’s a WordPress.org Slack channel. In there you can ask any questions. There is a Core channel that you can just go in and say, “Hey, is this right?” Maybe if you’re not 100 percent sure if, “Is it a bug? Is it not?” You can double check there. Or you can just start the Track ticket with the bug, and if it’s not something that’s urgent, or it’s not actually a bug, that’s the desired result, then somebody will let you know. They’ll close the ticket. Then you can just kind of move on from there.

So those are the four big ways that you can contribute to WordPress itself. You can contribute to the community. You can help with the Codex or the documentation. You can upload your themes, or plugins, to the repository for everyone to use. Or you can spend time fixing and updating things in WordPress Core. Those are the things that you can think about. These are different ways that you can get involved with WordPress.

I know this week I’m super excited to learn how to take the code that’s on WordPress, how to pull it down to my computer, how to fix it, how to create – it’s called a “diff file,” which gives you the ability to, the differences that you’ve just made, how you upload that back to Track, so that people can start looking at it, all those different types of things. I’m really – fingers crossed – I’m hoping that I’m learning this as you’re listening to this podcast episode this week.

So with that, I’m going to wrap up. I want to let you know, and just give you a reminder about, the webinar – YourWebsiteEngineer.com/webinar. We’ll get you all signed up. That will get you – you’ll learn how to restore from a backup. That’s one of the hardest things. We talk about, “Have a backup. Have a backup.” But we never really talk about how to restore from a backup. We’re going to be doing that, a deep dive into that, and I will see you then. But I will also talk to you next week. Take care. Bye-bye.