WordPress.org

WordPress Developer Blog

How to contribute

There are multiple ways you can contribute to WordPress via the Developer blog.

  • Participate: Chime in on topic discussions or share your ideas for topics that might help a larger group of developers
  • Write: Adopt one of the ideas to write about and volunteer as a writer.
  • Review: each drafted post goes through two reviews. You can contribute by reviewing blog posts according to editorial guidelines or from a technical aspect.
  • Become a Member of the Editorial Group: As part of the editorial group you would: approve topics, organize meetings, shepherd blog posts through the process, and assist with publishing posts. Note: It’s recommended that a member of the Editorial Group should be an experienced WordPress contributor who was or has been a team rep.

All work is organized via GitHub on the Dev Blog Content repository and its project board.

You are welcome to join the Slack channel #core-dev-blog to hang out and attend the meetings. The process is still in start-up mode, so things might change. Meetings are held every first Thursday of the month at 13:00 UTC in that channel.

From idea to published

The process from idea to published is outlined as follows:

Approved ideas become tasks as posts to be written, peer-reviewed, published, and amplified via social networks and subscription.

Discussion Board

Ideas for new content can be posted to Discussion > Ideas for discussion. Often ideas for posts need further development or where the initial concept needs fleshing out, receiving feedback and additional details before they are ready for approval and can then be assigned to a writer.

You can contribute by commenting in the discussions and help flesh out a previously broad idea. Alternatively, you could suggest an idea of your own, perhaps something that you would like to learn more about on the blog.

You can also use the Discussion board to asked questions and review the announcements.

Issues = tasks = posts

An Issue is an idea promoted to a task (=post to be written) on the repo/project board via the Create issue from discussion link on the discussion. Once turned into an issue it should have a summary of the future blog post, and a rough outline of the post. Once created, the issue will be labeled with flow labels that indicate the progress through the publishing process. The conversion process on GitHub closes the discussion for future comments. Further discussion continues on the Issue.

On the issue and the comments, the progress is tracked through these statuses

  • Topic needs approval – will be discussed at the next meeting of the Editorial Group
  • To-do – Is on the to-do list and if it doesn’t have a person assigned to it, will need a writer
  • In Progress – a writer has started working on the post. Discussions are held in issue comments.
  • Needs 1st review – Article is ready to be reviewed by other contributors. Review notes are shared in the issue comments
  • Needs 2nd review – Second reviewer also adds notes to the issue comments. Everyone of the Editorial Group is available to provide review notes for writers.
  • Ready to publish – Once the writer has incorporated feedback and missing information, the post is ready to be published.
  • Published (Done) – Article is available for the audience.

Project Board

Below you can see screenshots of the two views of the project space Status Table and Progress

The Status Table tab gives a quick overview of each post’s status.

The Progress Tab shows the status in columns

Props to @daisyo, @greenshady, @mburridge, and @webcommsat for review and ideas.