Contributing to WordPress Can Take Various Forms
Individual contributors are those who support the WordPress initiative in different directions:
- Submitting bug reports.
- Submitting patches for known bugs.
- Reviewing WordPress themes.
- Creating and submitting free themes and plugins.
- Helping out in the support forums.
- Translating WordPress (and popular plugins) to another language.
- Organizing meetups and WordCamps around the world.
- Reviewing videos before approving them on WordPress.tv .
There are a few other areas related to design, marketing, and training that are loosely defined and still open to contributions.
As a web developer interested in contributing to the core WordPress codebase, the best option is installing the latest trunk version of WordPress locally, finding a bug, and uploading a patch on WordPress Trac. You can browse the available tickets and find something that has been reported and hasn’t been solved yet. Make sure you have the right WordPress development setup in place.
Some WordPress Core Tickets Are a Lower Priority
They can easily take months. The core approval process itself is complicated – especially for complex fixes with thousands of permutations.
Looking for the pipeline for a recent release (minor or major) would likely get this patch approved sooner. Of course, you need to adhere to the best WordPress Coding Standards while submitting your patch.
A few years ago, I gave a talk at a virtual conference that explains the foundations of debugging WordPress. It also includes a practical workflow for contributing to WordPress. My patch went in a week after the talk and you can follow the same flow demonstrated in the video:
