WordPress Core Contributor

Once a year we gather with our whole company. At last year’s Grand Meetup, I took a class on core contributions to WordPress, taught by the amazing Gary and Mel (and assisted by Kelly).

I’m not gonna lie, having not worked with WordPress.org system for tracking issues and submitting patches before, it was pretty overwhelming, definitely if all you’re used to is the easy UX of GitHub. However, they guided us through the whole process with – what I can only imagine was a huge pile of – patience; and helped me and the others in the class submit our first patches into WordPress core.

My patches didn’t make it to WordPress 5.0, but were added to the next version. WordPress 5.1 came out yesterday, so I’m now officially a core contributor of the largest content management system in the world.

And that’s pretty exciting. To quote one of my colleagues:

I don’t think I was this excited when I graduated college

I’m not sure that this is entirely the case for me, but the fact that a tiny bit of CSS I helped write lives on millions of websites worldwide is an amazing feeling. When I joined WooThemes 4 years ago I barely knew CSS, only had basics in HTML and had never worked with PHP.

So what did I do? I helped make some of the edit buttons in the WordPress dashboard be easier to select on mobile devices by adding more space in between them and I tweaked the UI for the re-introduction of the Help Tab on mobile. As I said, the tiniest of tiny contributions; but contributions nonetheless.

I still have so much to learn, but this type of victories along the way sure helps with encouraging me (and I presume others) to keep doing so.

One of the other neat things about this, is that I could share my joy of being a first-time core contributor with over 200 others, including several of my colleagues at Automattic. WordPress is truly a community project.

— Job Thomas, WordPress core contributor 😉