On today’s episode we are going to start a month-long conversation about how to contribute to WordPress and today we’ll talk about how to contribute as a blogger right here on Your Website Engineer Podcast, Episode No. 357.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler and today, like I said, we are going to start this month-long conversation on different ways that we can give back and we can contribute to the WordPress Community. We’ll get to that in just a couple of seconds. I do have three announcements that I want to share with you and a plugin this week. My favorite news story that comes to you this week is coming from the WordPress.com Twitter account and this is in response to Twitter doubling the amount of characters that can be in a tweet. It went from 140 to 160 and WordPress.com put out a tweet that says, “We are proud to announce a 4,294,967,295-character count on all WordPress.com blogposts.

It was kind of a funny way to respond to what’s changed on Twitter. I’ve got a link in the Show Notes for the direct tweet but there’s a lot of replies to it and it’s kind of fun to see. Somebody commented that it’s a lifetime of tweets in a blogpost and it’s actually 15M tweets. That’s how much it will fit. Basically, that four billion number that I read off earlier is the limitation of – that’s how many characters will fit in 4 gigabytes and 4 gigabytes is how much that can fit in a table cell in My Sequel, so that’s what that number is all about. So, if you want to see some of the responses, head on over to the Show Notes to find that direct link.

Another thing that I want to share with you today is Jetpack 5.4 came out. There is a date picker now in the contact form. There’s been comment improvements and some welcome screens, so those are the BIG improvements that came in Jetpack 5.4. You’ll probably see a little notification, a nagging bit to update to the latest version and go ahead and do that. Now, the contact form is just a little bit more robust in that you can add a date picker to your forms, so that is that. Then the last thing is on the way of WPCLI and that is the command link interface. There’s a new project out there that’s trying to bring check sum verifications to plugins and themes. This basically will be a method of verifying the integrity of the files.

So, what that means is you can run a check sum against plugins to make sure that it’s got the same amount of code and make sure there’s no differences from what’s hosted on the WordPress repository and what’s in your website. So, I really am excited to see that. I really am excited about All Things WPCLI. It’s something that’s usually just a little bit over my head but I dabble in it a little bit. I use it pretty much daily when I’m working with WooCommerce support to activate and deactivate plugins. That’s about all I use WPCLI for but I know it’s got so much power and it can do so much more than that. All right, moving right along to the “Is There a Plugin for That” section, there is always a plugin for that.

There’s more than 50,000 plugins in the WordPress repository and the one that I want to share with you today is called Add Search to Menu and like all the other ones that I talk about here on the show it is free and in the WordPress repository and this will allow you to add a Search Form on your site navigation bar so your users can search easily across your site. You can use various plugins to do this but this is the one that looks like the most robust one that can do this. So, you can add that right there against your home, blog, cart – whatever menu items you have, you can make the right one. Most want a search form or you can put it underneath the main menu or you can have it be one of those ones where when you click on the box it actually expands and fills up some space and covers up some of the menu items. Whatever you may be looking for on your website, this is what you can do with Add Search to Menu. So, if you need a plugin, I recommend going over to the WordPress repository searching for that or, as always, you can find it in the Show Notes for Episode No. 357.

All right, today, like I said, we are going to talk about how to contribute to WordPress and this all comes about from my research in preparation for WordCamp Cincinnati. That’s happening in just about a month from now and I have been asked to be the keynote speaker, the opening keynote speaker, for WordCamp Cincinnati and this is a huge deal to me. It is something that – I love speaking. I try to speak at as many WordCamps as I can each and every year and it’s usually something technical. Like, I love being able to teach something or be able to, you know, here’s how to do this. These are the steps, here’s the checklist, whatever it may be. Like, those are the types of content that I love to create and to provide and I think it fits really well with my teaching style is in a WordCamp environment where I can teach for 30 minutes and then have questions for a few minutes and then be able to be available for questions the rest of WordCamp.

Well, this is something completely new to me and it’s in the keynotes file. Like I said, it’s the very first event and it’s just like, oh, how am I going to inspire and how am I going to really just kind of build the hype of this WordPress event that’s happening and I’ve been pondering it for weeks just trying to figure out what direction that I want to go. I don’t want to have some sort of technical talk because it may be – with everybody in the room it may be either to beginner-ish for some people or too technical for other people. So, I want to do something that was just a little bit more broad, so after a lot of debate and a lot of thought I’ve come up with the conclusion that I’m going to talk about the WordPress Community and how to make the WordPress Community your own.

While I was thinking about that I thought, oh, this would be a great series for the podcast as well to talk about different ways that you can get involved. So, I’m breaking it down over the next couple of weeks on how you can contribute to WordPress for different types of WordPress users. So, for the blogger, the designer, the developer, and for the store owner or the website owner and so that’s what we’re going to talk about. We’re going to dive in and I want to just kind of before we get started real close that I wanted to talk about what it means to contribute. A lot of people think that when you say, oh, I’ve contribute to WordPress, you know, most of the time when somebody says that exact phrase you think, oh, they helped to write some sort of code for WordPress and their name is in the release notes for the WordPress latest version.

I’m happy to say that I’ve done that once, maybe twice. I can’t remember. I was able to submit a patch, or whatnot, but the most amount of ways that you can give back to WordPress is you don’t have to know any code at all. There’s no code that’s necessary. I mean, me doing this podcast every week is a way for me to give back to the WordPress Community. It allows me to share my gifts and my talents, my passions, for speaking and training. That allows me to give this back to the WordPress Community. I don’t get paid to do this podcast. I do it because I love WordPress and I love learning things myself and then sharing them with others, so that’s one way that I contribute to the WordPress foundation and the WordPress project. So, today I want to talk – if you are a WordPress blogger, here’s a few examples and a few ways that you can give back to WordPress.

They’re not in any particular order. They’re in the order that I thought of as I was coming up with this list. There is maybe a dozen of them or so and so let’s just go ahead and dive right in. If you are a blogger, you are a perfect candidate to organize a WordCamp. I say that because bloggers have a unique perspective that most of the time they are WordPress users that stick completely inside of WP Admin. They’re not adding any code or doing any high-level things and this allows to make sure that a WordCamp is centered and structured around providing content for ALL levels of WordPress users. WordCamps are great ways to give back to the community just by volunteering for helping out, setting up coffee, doing registration. There are tons of things you can do for a WordCamp event and if you have a WordCamp that’s local or close to you, I definitely recommend helping to organize a WordCamp.

Eventually, later if you’ve done a few WordCamps and you want to get out and start speaking, that’s also an opportunity there but the first one I want to share today is to help organize a WordCamp. Another thing that you can do as a WordPress blogger, or just anyone using WordPress, is you can answer basic questions on the WordPress forums. It’s amazing to see that no matter where you are in your journey with WordPress there’s always something that you can learn and there’s always something that you can teach. No matter what level that you’re at even if you are brand-new and you’ve just signed in, you can teach somebody else how to sign into WordPress and so just look on the WordPress forums. You can go in and you can answer people’s questions. You can point them to tutorials. You can point them to the right answers. You can give them the answers.

There are lots of things that you can do on the WordPress forums and anybody can go there and they can answer questions that are happening on the WordPress forums. I guess the next one I put – this kind of went with the last one but was to speak or attend local WordPress meetups. So, not necessarily a WordCamp but there are local meetup groups. I believe that I saw that there were more than 500 groups on Meetup.com across the world where you can go and you can learn about WordPress. The can be weekly meetings or they can be monthly or bimonthly or a few times a year but you can look these up on Meetup.com and just search for WordPress and you’ll find ones that are in the closest area. These are much less intimidating to speak at or to organize an event. Usually, you have anywhere between 5 to 30 people and it’s once per month. It’s not like a WordCamp where here could be hundreds of people listening to sessions. So, this is a great way to teach something small or teach something that you’ve learned or show off different ways that you can do things within WordPress. So, that’s another opportunity to give back to WordPress. The next one that I have on my list is to teach a friend or colleague how to use WordPress. Maybe you’ve been using WordPress for a couple of years and then they have some questions and then you could sit down and share with them different ways that you can, you know, just teach them how to use WordPress or just kind of watch them use WordPress and then give them hints and suggestions on how to do to. Hey, maybe you could add a new post doing it THIS way or I have better luck if I have two windows open – one at the backend of my website and one at the frontend of my website and then when I make a change, then I can just refresh the page. Just how little tips and tricks and things like that to your friends and colleagues that are using WordPress.

Another thing that you can do if you can speak multiple languages is you can help to translate WordPress into other languages. They are always looking for people to, I believe, the terminology is polyglot. They are looking for people to be able to translate phrases from WordPress into different languages. There are a handful of languages. Some of the most popular languages like French, German, Spanish and a few more that have – most of the plugins are actually translated to another language. So, if a user has changed their language of WordPress they’ve changed it from English to Spanish, then a lot of the plugins will actually – all of the backend details for a plugin, the settings pages and all that stuff will be in Spanish as well because they’ve been translated. They’re trying to get to that point so it isn’t just this disjointed experience for people when they come to their website and WordPress is all in Spanish.

But then you start working through plugins and different things and those are in different languages, so that’s something too that you can help out as well. I’d love to help out with that but I do not know enough Spanish or any other language to actively participate. So, that’s something else that you can do to give back to WordPress. Another thing that you can do since you are a blogger, which usually means that you have some ability to do writing or technical writing, is you can help the WordPress team to keep the documentation updated. So, there’s thousands of pages of documentation inside of WordPress.org and that is a great way to go in and just help keep that stuff updated. You know, you can read through a page. You can see what may need changed and how you can do that. There’s lots of ways to volunteer on the documentation team and that even helps to do some of the press release things and some of the new documentation for brand new stuff like Gutenberg.

Like, if you wanted to get in on the very front line, you could learn how to use Gutenberg frontwards and backwards and then be able to write some documentation on here is how to add a block in Gutenberg and here’s how to do this because Gutenberg is going to be brand new for thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people whenever it comes out, I guess. So, having documentation that’s definitely necessary and needed before that can be released. Another thing that you can do is you can volunteer on the accessibility team. There are lots of opportunities there to look at different parts of WordPress and see where it fails accessibility-wise. This isn’t one of my strong suits but this is something, you know, make sure that all images have a title tag or the text tag or the alt tag so screen readers can read them and make sure that, you know, things can be changed into a different color format to make it easier for people that can only see certain colors. Like, is it ready for people that have colored blindness or things like that? There’s TONS of opportunities to just do testing and you can run pages through different scanners and different things and suggest, hey, this page needs updated or this needs to be fixed to meet the accessibility standards of 2017. So that’s another thing that you can do. You could blog about WordPress. You could create a blog or a podcast or a video series. You can do something very similar to me and there’s tons of ways to give back to WordPress and this is one of them. Just talk about the things that you have learned. Talk about why you like WordPress. Just share all this information about WordPress and that’s a great way to just continue to build a community.

Right now, like 28-ish percent of the web is using WordPress and we’d love to grow that number to 30, to 40, to 50 percent and it just helps by you spreading the word of taking some time and just sharing with others why you use WordPress and what you like about it. Going along that same route you can also tell your friends about WordPress when they ask about websites. You could even learn a little bit about Shopify or Magenta or some of these other platforms and be able to say why WordPress is better and here’s some examples and here’s some reasons. Yes, it may be harder to set up. You can explain to get WordPress set up and running but you’re going to have the flexibility of the freedom; whereas, on Shopify you don’t have that flexibility and that freedom. If you’re going to set up a store, maybe WooCommerce is going to be the best route.

On Shopify you are going to have all these additional fees that you don’t have on WooCommerce. Like, just being able to share the knowledge of why WordPress is better than other platforms is going to help be a tremendous value to the WordPress Community. Another thing that I came up with and thought about is if you use the mobile apps – maybe you’re using the IOS app or the Android app for WordPress, you can submit suggestions back to the developers. If you are a blogger that is, you know, regularly blogging on the go and you want to be able to do that, I recommend just submitting that feedback. Like, oh, I’d really like if this keyboard layout would be a little bit different or why do you have to tap four times to add the right category, or whatever those pieces of feedback may be.

Any little thing that you think may be helpful could impact the larger WordPress Community. So, I think that’s one of the important things to think about when you’re giving back to the community because in general you think, oh, I’m not going to get paid for any of this. Like, obviously, we’re all part of this volunteer community, which I think is amazing in itself. WordPress doesn’t really pay anybody to write code for WordPress and it’s all voluntary-based and lots of people are doing this on the side. You know, some companies will pay people to work on WordPress but nobody from the WordPress Foundation is paying developers to work on this code, so it’s all people from around the world who love this. It’s a passion project for them and the cool part is if you’d make these suggestions – say you submit a suggestion to make the WordPress app and then all of a sudden now 10,000 people who use that app on a daily basis, now their lives are easier and now they can create better content or they can publish it much easier, whatever that looks like. What you’re doing and how you’re volunteering is all of these things except for maybe the WordCamps. The WordCamps are ones that aren’t quite as big of a deal because WordCamps are more of a local community. But some of these other things like answering on the forum, translating WordPress, helping to keep documentation updated, all of these are going to be seen by the masses, like tens of thousands of people read documentation and thousands upon thousands of people translate their WordPress sites into different languages. So, all of these things – it’s not like we’re going for monetary gain.

We’re not going to get shouting rights or bragging rights for things that we’ve accomplished but just think that the things that we can help, the things that we can contribute back to WordPress, these are going to be for the masses. It’s going to be for lots and lots of people. So, those are the things that I thought about for the blogger. Those are things that you want to think about this week. Just set a little time aside. I think a few town halls ago – not town halls but Word Camp U.S. is a go. They talk about five for the future and Matt Mullenweg really guaranteed or he suggested that we should all spend 5 percent of our week, 5 percent of our month, 5 percent of whatever period that we want, to give back to the WordPress Community. If you work a 40-hour week, that’s talking about two hours per week to give back in some way to the WordPress Community.

It takes me about two hours each week to do this podcast from coming up with an idea, writing the Show Notes, and recording it, editing it, and all that good stuff. So, I can see that’s my 5 percent back to the WordPress Community but if you have two hours a week or, you know, a few hours per month that you can volunteer and give back to the WordPress Community, that’s what it’s all about and that’s going to keep this project continuing to move forward and continuing to just get better each and every day. Each and every release will get better and better and WordPress will just continue to take over the web and allow people to publish the things that they want to. They will be able to democratize publishing, so that’s the content that I wanted to share with you today. I’m excited about contributing. I think that if I had more time – it’s really hard with two little kids in the house to find more time to contribute but I would love to be able to help with the documentation and some of the other things that we’ll talk about in the coming weeks.

I’ve already got them written down of things that I’d love to do if I had the time. Just not right now in this season of life, so I’ll continue with my contribution for creating this podcast episode every week and that’s the action item that I will take forward this week. So, those were the ways that I came up with to contribute back to WordPress as a WordPress blogger. Next week we’ll talk about how to contribute as a WordPress developer. Until then, take care, and we’ll talk again soon. Bye.