Contributing to Open Source

Joel Clermont@jclermont

Sunday, June 3, 12

About Me

• Partner at Orion Group

• PHP, JS, .NET, Ruby, iOS, (Lisp?)

• Organizer of Milwaukee PHP User Group mkepug.com

• Organizer of MobileMKE meetup.com/MobileMKE

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Goals for today

• Why should I contribute to open source?

• What types of help is needed?

• How do I make a meaningful contribution?

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Why? What’s in it for me?

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The altruistic reason

• Give something back to the community

• How much does a WordPress license cost again?

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Commercial CMS licenses

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The selfish reasons

• Make your own life easier (fix a bug, improve docs, etc)

• Scratch your own itch (build something entirely new)

• Resume/career booster (good for freelancers too)

• Get experience and become a better developer

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Selfish reasons > Altruistic reason

• But who cares? Everyone benefits

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What? Not just code

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Neckbeard and CompSci degrees are optional

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Help wanted

• Documentation http://codex.wordpress.org/Codex:Contributing

• Translation http://codex.wordpress.org/Translating_WordPress

• Testing http://codex.wordpress.org/Mailing_Lists#Testers

• Bugs http://core.trac.wordpress.org/

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More than just PHP

• Mobile platforms are open source too

• HTML / CSS / JS required for themes and plugins

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Help the larger WordPress ecosystem

• Plugins

• Themes

• Utilities

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How? Ready to dive in?

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How to get started

• Work on something that interests you personally

• Follow the coding standards

• http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Coding_Standards

• Understand the community

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Communicate

• Mailing lists

• http://codex.wordpress.org/Mailing_Lists

• IRC

• #wordpress and #wordpress-dev on Freenode

• Forums

• http://wordpress.org/support

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Get involved with the broader community

• Github

• Attend events

• Volunteer to speak

Milwaukee PHP

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PHP Code Sniffer for WordPress

• Simple fix, but incredibly useful

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Search Replace DB utility

• Didn’t work with my wp-config setup

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Removing code feels good

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Learning something new

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Vulnero (v2)

• Just started architecture/design

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Useful Links

• OpenHatch - “training level” for open source

• http://openhatch.org/missions/

• WordPress developer documentation

• http://codex.wordpress.org/Developer_Documentation

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What next?

• Start small, but start soon

• Slides posted on joelclermont.com this evening

• Contact me for help / questions

• Twitter @jclermont

• #devmke (freenode)

Sunday, June 3, 12