Preparing for Contributor Day

Posted on by Hugh Lashbrooke

This year, we’re hosting our first ever Contributor Day at WordCamp Cape Town on Saturday, 3 November – the day after WordCamp.

A Contributor Day is a single day, usually connected with a WordCamp, where members of the local WordPress community come together to contribute back to the WordPress project. These contributions range across broad spectrum of areas, all encapsulated in the 18 different contribution teams in the project.

This is not just for developers! At this year’s Contributor Day we’ll work together as a community to help grow WordPress in as many ways as we can – including translating WordPress, writing documentation, writing patches for Core, testing new features, patching WordPress.org itself, helping in the support forums, and many other ways.

Does this sound like something you’d like to do? Sign up here – it’s free and open to all WordCamp attendees.

How do I prepare for Contributor Day?

The preparation you need to do depends on what type of contributions you want to work on, so we’ll include some tailored instructions below. No matter what you plan on doing, however, you will need to join the Making WordPress Slack group.

Join WordPress.org & Slack

All WordPress contributors need to have a WordPress.org profile. If you do not already have one, then you can create one here.

The WordPress project uses Slack as its main real-time communication platform. Everyone involved in contributing to the project is on the Slack group and uses it as the central platform to discuss their work. You can join the Making WordPress Slack group (for free of course) by going to this page and following the quick guide. 

As a bonus, you can also join the local South Africa WordPress community Slack group from the link on this page. This is not required for Contributor Day, but it is a great place to connect with the rest of the WordPress community around the country.

Catch up on Contribution Team News

Each contribution team in the WordPress project, uses their team blog to post updates and keep everyone informed. You can find links to each team’s blog from the central Making WordPress page. Head over there and follow the blogs for the teams that you’re interested in.

Familiarise Yourself with Translations

If you want to help translate WordPress, head over to the Translating WordPress portal and find the locale(s) you would like to contributions translations towards. If you do not see your preferred locale there then follow this guide to request that it be added. You will need to do this at least a few days before the event to make sure that the locale is available for you on the day.

Catch up on the Support Guidelines

If you plan on assisting in the WordPress support forums then it would useful to read up on the Support team’s guide to giving good support.

Read the Documentation

All areas of the WordPress project need good documentation, so if you would like to get involved in improving the documentation for any particular team, then you can review each team’s ‘handbook’ from their site on the Make network. This is also a great way to see what kind of work each team needs done, so that you can get involved in areas where your work will really make a difference.

The Documentation team also has some useful information about how to get involved. Most areas of documentation require you to be given the correct access permission to edit – you can request these permissions in the relevant team’s channel in the Making WordPress Slack group once you have joined there.

Set up a Local Development Environment

For those who plan on contributing with code – whether you will be contributing to WordPress core or WordPress.org (also known as “Meta”) – then you will need a local WordPress development environment. There are a few ways of getting this working depending on your preferred method of local development:

Given how long these installations can take, you will need to get this setup before you arrive for Contributor Day.

You’ll also need to review the general guide to contributing to Core, in particular the Introduction to Trac, the WordPress Core bug tracker.

Test the New Core Editor

Gutenberg, the upcoming editor for WordPress Core, is in rapid development. You can help out by installing the plugin and logging issues on the GitHub repo. You can install this plugin on any WordPress website  – whether it’s a local installation or on a server hosted elsewhere. This editor will be officially launched in WordPress Core in v5.0, which is scheduled for release in November. 

Test the Latest Core Features

If you would like to help build WordPress Core, but don’t know how to contribute code (or would rather not do so), then you can help out by testing the upcoming and in development features of WordPress. The Beta Testing guide will show you how to install the Beta Testing plugin. You can do this on any WordPress site – whether it’s a local installation or on a server hosted elsewhere.

Help Build WordPress.org

‘Meta’ is the name given to the WordPress.org website itself, along with its related sites (such as WordCamp.org where you’re reading this). If you have set your WordPress development environment up using the Vagrant method mentioned above, then you can install the complete WordPress.org Meta environment (including SVN repos) from this GitHub repo.

Organise Local Events

We already have an active WordPress community in Cape Town (this event is evidence of that), but we’re always looking for more people to help make our community more exciting and tailored the unique needs of those who attend. If you would like to assist with organising local meetups, hackathons, or even the next WordCamp, then this is a great day to put your hand up and get started with helping to build our local WordPress community.

When & Where is Contributor Day Happening?

Our Contributor Day will be taking place on Saturday, 3 November 2018 – the day after WordCamp. It will not be at the WordCamp venue, but will be held at the offices of NONA, a digital agency who have graciously sponsored their space to us for the day.

The address for the venue is:

Office G3A
The Old Castle Brewery
6 Beach Road
Woodstock

Here it is on Google Maps. Secure parking is available in the complex.

The planned schedule for the day is as follows:

We will kick off at 10am and work on contributions for the day through to 4pm, generally keeping things pretty flexible while we’re working. If you can only make it for part of the day, then that’s not a problem – any time you can give to help improve WordPress is always appreciated.

Over the course of the day you can work on any of the areas of contribution that you like – you do not have to stick with one area and you are welcome to switch to different teams throughout the day. We will have people to help guide you in contributing, so if this is your first time doing so then come along and we’ll help you get started!

Some Useful Links

Related to the above information, here are a few handy links (some already mentioned) that are useful for everyone involved in contributing to WordPress:

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