WordPress Contributor Day for Dummies

I want to demystify WordPress Contributor Day.

Back when I was organising the contributor day for WordCamp Manchester, I came out to WordCamp Europe in Paris to see a big Contributor Day in action and figure out how it really works.

What Is A WordPress Contributor Day?

When I first heard the term’ WordPress contributor day,’ I imagined it was a day for all the volunteers and speakers to get together. I’m not sure to what purpose; I didn’t think that far. But in case you did have any strange notions like me, here’s what it is. A contributor is anyone who wants to contribute to WordPress.

A Contributor Day is a structured work day for the Make WordPress teams. You sit at a team table (Core, Design, Docs, Training, Accessibility, etc.), get onboarded, pick something small and real to work on, and by the end of the day, you have shipped a contribution with your name on it.

When I learned this, I thought I would have to know how to code the hard stuff, and I don’t have that level of proficiency, but that wasn’t the case at all. l. There are a dozen or so ways you can contribute.

If you work with WordPress in any serious way – as an agency, freelancer, product company or in-house dev team, Contributor Day is where you see how the project actually runs. It is also where you meet the people who engineer the tools your clients rely on every day.

These days, Contributor Days also tie into the “Five for the Future” programme. Agencies and product companies commit time for staff to work on WordPress, and Contributor Day is one of the easiest ways to turn that commitment into actual work and credit.

Contribution isn’t limited to WordPress Contributor Day.

Joining the Slack community first is always a good idea. That way, you can see all the different things every day.

WordPress Contributor Day isn’t just limited to WordCamps. If you haven’t already, get yourself a wordpress.org account and sign up to Slack to join the dialogue with thousands of others.

The day itself is only one entry point. Most contributors start by creating a WordPress.org account and taking the “find your team” quiz on make.wordpress.org. From there, you can join team meetings, pick up your first issues and then turn up at Contributor Day already warmed up.

The practical steps: create a WordPress.org account, follow the Contribute/Join wizard, then join the Slack channels it suggests. That is it. No secret handshake.

WordPress Core

Although you need to know some code, you don’t have to be an expert. There are contributions available at all levels. You can report bugs, test patches, and fix bugs.

There is a labelled set of “good first bugs” if you want something small and safe for a first contribution.

Core also leans heavily on automated testing now. If you are into test suites and CI, the Test team overlaps a lot with Core and is a good place to start.

For more reading, see the contributor handbook on WordPress.org.

Design

Has Core spooked you a little? Are you more of a front-end type of person? Why not join the design team, where you can shape the WordPress user interface? Design includes user testing. Developers can make everything work, but it won’t be that great without an intuitive user journey. That’s why thousands of designers have contributed to making the UI what it is today. So you can see just how far WordPress has come.

If you like watching UI decisions play out in public, the Design team blog is where the admin and editor changes are discussed long before users see them.

Mobile

The mobile team works on iOS and Android apps using Kotlin, Swift, and React Native. They always need people who care about UX and reliability across devices, and they lean on a steady stream of testers as new features ship.

It’s ideal for anyone with an eye for UX design. Mobile also needs testers, especially Android; see the call for testers here.

This is the team that shapes the tools your clients see on their phones. Spending a day here teaches you more about the WordPress mobile roadmap than any keynote could. See the call for testers here.

Accessibility

As you may have guessed, this teamwork is on making WordPress as accessible to all as it can be.

This team works on accessibility across WordPress Core, themes, plugins and documentation. They run audits, set coding standards, test new features with assistive tech, and keep accessibility documentation up to date.

Sitting with this team for a day will give you a much sharper sense of where your own builds pass or fail basic a11y checks.

Polyglots

You may not know a shred of code, but you may be able to speak and write more than one language. If so, the WordPress Community is near you! Aside from joining in at WordCamps, there is also a global translation day you can join online.

Polyglots also run recurring WordPress Translation Day events, both online and at WordCamps, so you can drop in from anywhere and work in your own language.

Slack

Slack is the real-time chat for contributors and the WordPress community. Each make team has its own channels, and Contributor Days usually start with a quick “join this channel” onboarding so you can keep working after the event.

The UK Slack community is also very friendly, and its channels range from formal development to events and life in general.

User support for WordPress itself still lives in the WordPress.org support forums, which is where most non-contributors should go first.

If you like helping users, the Support team hangs out in Slack but does the actual support work in the forums. That first answer you write there counts as a contribution.

Themes

If you create themes for WordPress, a team is dedicated to reviewing themes submitted to the theme repository. This group is open to anyone who wants to help out.

These days, a lot of the work is around block themes and patterns, so if you build modern theme setups for clients, the standards here will look very familiar.

Documentation

Everything needs to be documented in a way that people understand. The documentation team make this possible.

This could be contributor handbooks, user help articles, or developer docs on developer.wordpress.org.

Training

The community would love to have you if you know how to use WordPress! It doesn’t matter where your skill level lies.

If you know how to use WordPress, you can help the Training team. They run Learn WordPress: courses, lesson plans, workshops, and tutorials, and always need people to write, edit, review, test, and teach.

Meta

It’s the meta team that keeps the wordpress.org websites up to date.

The Meta team keeps WordPress.org and the contributor tooling alive. If you like building dashboards and internal tools, this is where you’ll feel at home.

TV

All things video: a lot of learning, announcements, talks, and training are available on WordPress.tv. The WordPress TV Team maintains this. If you know anything about video, join this team; if you don’t, well, they need captioners and translators, too.

At Contributor Days, TV tables often focus on reviewing recent WordCamp talks and adding captions. It is a good place to start if you like video but do not want to be in front of the camera.

Flow

As the name suggests, this team is responsible for the entire WordPress experience across all platforms, ensuring a synchronous, seamless user experience that flows well.

The Test team includes a Flow “patrol” group that documents real user journeys across devices and catches bugs in the experience. If you like clicking around, breaking things and taking screenshots, this is a contribution, even if you never touch PHP.

CLI

WordPress-CLI is the Command Line Interface for anyone who doesn’t know, making installation, automation, staging and deployment much better. If you are intrigued, check out their contributing guide for more information.

If your agency team already scripts deployments, the WP-CLI project is a good fit: you can improve the tools you already use in CI.

Marketing

For a long time, there was a Make Marketing team focused on promotion, storytelling and campaign support. That group is currently archived while the project experiments with a new Media Corps model and more decentralised outreach.

If your day job is marketing, you can still contribute by helping your local Meetups and WordCamps, sharing contributor stories, and supporting teams who are short on content and messaging.

Wrapping Up

In the end, Contributor Day is just people in a room doing the work that keeps WordPress moving. Some write code, some test, some translate, some fix a line of docs that has annoyed them for years. None of it happens by magic.

If you build on WordPress for a living, you already know so much of this. Spending a day with the project teams gives you a better view of what is coming, where the gaps are, and how the tools you rely on actually get built. You also meet the humans behind the tickets, which makes the whole thing a lot easier to care about.

At Made By Factory, we spend most of our time building and improving client sites, but days like this keep us plugged into the source. When we contribute back, whether that is a bug report, our clients benefit. Their sites sit on a platform we understand from the inside. Want an agency that knows WordPress from the inside out and continues to learn it deeply? Speak to us today.