Time: Alongside the conference on October 22nd
Remember: Bring your own laptop
What is Contributor Day?
Contributor’s day are for everyone, of every experience level. Even someone who knows very little about WordPress can contribute by answering support questions. It is an opportunity to work on various aspects of WordPress giving back to the project and the community.
Attendees break up into teams and focused on a particular segment of WordPress. The following are some examples of the areas that teams work on during a Contributor’s Day.
- Core – There are generally two different groups at a contributor day: those who have contributed to core before and those who haven’t. It’s usually best to split the core group into two, letting previous contributors work on new contributions and teaching new contributors how to contribute. You’ll probably want two leads here, but it’ll depend on attendance at your WordCamp.For new contributors, you need to go through a number of things, most of which are listed in the sidebar of the core contributor handbook. Be sure to cover how to use trac, what makes a good ticket, how to setup a local development environment (if needed), and general best practices (coding standards).
- Support – Most contributions here will be to the support forums. You should go through what the support team does and focus on answering questions in the support forums. Be sure to give information on stock answers and help users setup a WordPress.org account.
- Training – The training team creates downloadable lesson plans and related materials for instructors to use in a live workshop environment. If you enjoy teaching people how to use and build stuff for WordPress, stop by and learn about contributing to our team! focus.
- Docs – At contributor days docs contributions are generally editing and improving the theme and plugin developer handbooks. However, some people may want to improve the codex or contribute examples to the developer hub. Talk to a docs contributor ahead of time to make sure someone is around to give out Editor status on make/docs.
- Community –The Community team oversees official events, mentorship programs, diversity initiatives, contributor outreach, and other ways of growing our community. At Contributor days, we work on many tasks – getting new people involved, improving our documentation to name a couple.
- Theme Review Team – A full walkthrough on how to review themes is important. Likewise, be sure to contact a TRT admin so they can be around during your contributor day and can assign tickets to new contributors.
- Mobile – The mobile handbook is generally up-to-date. For contributors to either the iOS or Android apps, they should have a knowledge of development on their respective platform. Following the handbook at that point shouldn’t be hard.
- Polyglots – Contributing string translations to a current localization of WordPress is a great way to get started. The document linked to walks through how that should be done. If you’re hosting a WordCamp in a language that does not have a full translation of WordPress (or related projects), it can be good to set one up ahead of time with the polyglots team and kick off your translation work there. The first step there will be requesting a new locale.
- Meta – The meta team is programming-based, for the most part. The WordPress Meta Environment (based on VVV) is the best way to get setup and contribute to the open sourced projects that the meta team manages, including wordcamp.org, global.wordpress.org (rosetta), jobs.wordpress.net, developer.wordpress.org, and apps.wordpress.org.
- Accessibility – Generally, we group the accessibility team with core so they can contribute their testing or programming expertise to core tickets with the “accessibility” focus.