New WordPress Contributors Meeting Provides Opportunities to Ask Questions and Learn the Ropes

Contributing to WordPress or other open source projects can be intimidating for first-time contributors. Sometimes, all you need is a helping hand to overcome fear, intimidation, or other barriers.

In 2013, with the help of Konstantin Obenland, a WordPress core developer, I overcame my fear and contributed my first patch to WordPress.

This is one of the principles behind a new weekly meeting that is geared towards new contributors.

“The new contributors meeting is the perfect place to come if you are new to contributing to WordPress core and have questions,” Adam Silverstein, WordPress core contributor, said.

Every Wednesday at 3PM Eastern Daylight Time, users can visit the #core WordPress Slack channel and ask questions related to patches, tickets, and review the good-first-bugs report on Trac.

The first meeting was held on July 5th where participants asked questions about working with Git in WordPress core, applying patches, and unit testing. In the second meeting, participants discussed whether or not new contributors are allowed to make changes to tickets.

Other topics mentioned include, which repositories to use, clarification on contributing to core versus updating the WordPress Developer’s site, and which tickets to select for review.

The next meeting is on Wednesday, July 19th at 3PM Eastern. If you have any questions on how to contribute to WordPress, be sure to join the WordPress #core Slack channel at that time and ask away.

Meeting notes with links to discussions, tickets mentioned, and other resources are published on the Make WordPress Core blog under the #new-contributors tag