A month or two ago I had the pleasure of spending a day with other WordPress developers, designers and users at the WorcdCamp Manchester Contributor Day. As I have been working with WordPress for over 7 years now, and now earn my living from the software I think it is about time that I start giving back to the project. As part of this I intend, as often as I can to undergo a WordPress Sunday Support Hour.
It can be quite daunting thinking about contributing to the project. Most people think of contributing as offering up some code that will eventually appear in core and then be used by millions of people worldwide. As a developer this is something that I would love to do eventually, but I have to say, if I am honest that the process of contributing core code I found quite difficult. This is not because of a lack of support. Mike Little and Tom Wilmot where kind enough to help me get a local development environment setup on my Mac but I found it hard to just get started with contributing bug fixes and testing patches.
Therefore I went looking for other ways in which to contribute. The make.wordpress.org resource is a good place to start if you are looking to contribute. It lists all the areas and how to get started. The one that stood out to me, as an educator was the support section. Surely I could help people out in the support forums?
Well, I headed on over there last weekend and found myself assisting others with their queries and giving something back to those that needed help. It was very rewarding and I finally thought that I was achieving something on my road to WordPress contribution. I sent this tweets just before I started:
Spending an hour in the #Wordpress.org support forums for contributing purposes and because it helps others. Why not do the same?
— Mark Wilkinson (@wpmark) July 24, 2014
I was amazed at how popular it was. 27 retweets, 9 favourites and 2 replies. Doesn’t sound much perhaps but that has got to be one of my most, it not most popular tweet.
Therefore I have decided that I am going to offer my skills in the wordpress.org support forums for 1 hour every Sunday (or as much as I can) in what I am hashtagging as #wpsundaysupporthour. So why not get involved and do the same?
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