Learning how to contribute to WordPress won’t take long and I wanted to put this quick post together because I see a lot of people complain about WordPress features or its lack of some obscure functionality. The WordPress codebase is vast and packs in a lot of features, but it’s impossible to take every minute feature to its full potential without developers and contributors.
So the next time you feel like complaining, why not contribute to WordPress instead? Here is a quick start guide to contributing to WordPress:
- Open a terminal window and create a new directory to work in.
- Checkout the latest version of WordPress by running
$ svn checkout http://develop.svn.wordpress.org/trunk. - Make your proposed changes.
- Now you’ll generate your patch file, be sure to do this inside the
trunk/directory so that your paths are correct:$ svn diff > patch_name.diff - Visit WordPress Trac and click the big blue “Create a new ticket” button; most of the fields should be straightforward.
Boom! Now you have no excuse for not contributing to WordPress! Your brilliant idea could become part of the next release and forever a part of the WordPress codebase!
Thanks to Clorith from the #wordpress IRC chan for this. Leave questions in the comments!