WordPress needs us all. There are many ways to give back to the WordPress community: releasing free plugins, sponsoring WordPress focused events, helping in the support forums or contributing to the core WordPress project.
This last option sounds very scary and only a real possibility for expert WordPress “hardcore” developers. But this is far from true. In fact, today I completed my first contribution to the WordPress project in under 10 minutes and zero coding. How? By contributing to the WordPress Codex, the “online manual for WordPress and a living repository for WordPress information and documentation”, that is, the place where you will end up anytime you look for any kind of official WordPress documentation.
While browsing the Codex pages, I ended up in the plugin submission page and realized it included a subsection referencing a couple of external websites where you could announce your plugin. One of them was abandoned and, anyway, I don’t think WordPress should favour any specific external website (this would be the source of a lot of irrelevant discussions) so I edited the page and removed the links. A minor change, yes, but one that I think it improves the page and (even if at a minuscule level) WordPress itself.
You see, the WordPress source code is only of the many aspects that constitute the “WordPress experience”. And improving the Codex is something all WordPress users can do, no matter their level of expertise. So, what are you waiting for? Add yourself to the list of people supporting WordPress and help the community to move it forward! We need you!
(If I managed to convince you, read these simple instructions to get you started or check the presentation below; note that even if you don’t feel confident enough to modify any page yourself you could still contribute to the discussion on how to improve the page content and/or tag the page for review if you think it’s now outdated, redundant,… )
Featured image by Wikimedia Commons
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