I had the distinct pleasure of addressing the Australian WordPress Community in delivering the keynote at WordCamp Sydney 2014 this morning. Here’s the slideshow, toggle the content below for the transcript.
Good morning!!
So glad you’re here! It’s going to be a great weekend. Thanks to Wil and Kristen, Peter and Nicole for pulling this together. Organising a WordCamp is a crazy thing where designers and developers decide to become event organisers for a season… and let me tell you, it’s a stretch… so put your hands together for these guys… They deserve a medal.
You’re going to hear a lot about WordPress this weekend. A lot about how great it is, what people are doing with it, basically a lot about What WordPress can do for YOU.
I’m actually going to turn that on its head for just these few moments I have your attention. Because I’m here to ask you to consider, while you’re listening to all the things WordPress will do for you, maybe in the back of your mind keep a little bit of space for the thought that maybe there’s something that YOU can do for WordPress…
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Word Press isn’t built by itself. It isn’t built by a corporation, and it isn’t build by one person. WordPress is being built by a community. A community of people just like you.
Seriously. Just like you.
However, if you’re anything like me, you’ve thought about the core software in relation to your ability to code, and you’ve felt as though you’ve come up short to be able contribute meaningfully to it…
Well, I’m happy to say that it takes more than just code to make WordPress, and on that basis alone there is room for everyone to take part in the whole wider WordPress project.
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Building WordPress also takes a designers and architects… because being user friendly doesn’t happen without the community contributing what ‘user friendly’ looks like… and doing things like building for mobile, and designing the WordPress UX, and working to make WordPress more accessible needs community contributions to actually talk, workshop and plan what works, and for that matter, what doesn’t.
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It takes a knowledge base… because every person who downloads and installs WordPress for the first time and who gets onto this learning curve needs a codex that resources users quickly to get to grips with the software and how it works.
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It takes a support team… because where searching the codex doesn’t yield the results we expected (or our search terms weren’t specific enough) we need the forums and support of the community who’ve already learned how to navigate WordPress’ quirks and who freely share that knowledge.
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It also takes a language team, because the world doesn’t just speak English so WordPress needs to be adaptable to other languages in order to be useful to the WHOLE world, not just the English speaking world.
So, it’s all very well to talk about what the users are doing to build the WordPress project… How do these needs actually translate into valid and practical ways people like us can contribute?
On the Make WordPress blog there are 12 areas in which the community are invited to contribute to WordPress. So this morning I’m going to introduce those areas to you, and where I know of them, introduce you also to Australians who are contributing in those areas.
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First up… we are invited to write the documentation.
Did you know that the Codex is a wiki?
Do you know what a wiki is? According the grandaddy of all wikis, Wikipedia “A wiki is a web application which allows people to add, modify, or delete content in collaboration with others”
All you have to do to participate in editing the codex and adding your knowledge and expertise, (even if it’s grammar and spelling) is sign up, create a user page, spend a bit of time learning how to stick within the style guides.
And then, whenever you’re surfing the codex and you’re logged in you can edit or tweak any page that you’re on.
This is a great opportunity for our friendly community grammar nazis to get their game on…
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So, if you follow me on twitter you may have seen a few weeks back that I put the call out to people to ‘tell me their WordPress story.”
I’m actually pretty fascinated by the whole WordPress community and I was really interested to know what it is that had brought people into WordPress and what they were doing with it.
I have collated a few of the responses to that survey and am going to introduce some of these people and their stories to show you that ANYONE can contribute to WordPress, all it actually takes is to find the space that you are interested in, put your hand up to help, roll up your sleeves and get in there…
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This is Anthony who is one of those community member’s who’s got quite a few runs on the board in the contribution department… He has written a plugin, and the starter theme he has on the WP repo has had over 50,000 downloads. Ant has contributed to the Codex and done whole lot of helping the forums. He’s also the author of a WordPress manual that has been downloaded over 120,00 times… As if that wasn’t enough he’s spoken at and helped organise WordCamps and is one of the organisers and of the Melbourne meet up group.
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The community are also supporting other users.
Anyone can answer people’s questions in the Forums… It’s actually really easy… Log into your WordPress.org account, scroll down to the bottom of the forums front page, find the No Replies link, hit that and dive in and respond to the queries with your answers!
Just a note on this. Maybe sometimes you’ll be right, maybe there’ll be better answers than yours… don’t sweat, it. Everyone, in my experience are incredibly generous and helpful, they’ll respect that you’re helping, and it’s an awesome opportunity to keep learning yourself. Even those of us who are long in the tooth in this environment have a lot to learn and a lot to contribute.
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Wil is a man whose face you’ll see a lot this weekend. He is a developer building client sites, developing plugins and a is regular contributor in the WordPress.org forums helping users. He’s also a co-organiser of WordCamp Sydney (yep, this one) and of three regular meet ups a month here in Sydney.
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Brad is an Aussie developer who builds sites in WordPress and publishes blog posts tutorials to share what he’s learned whenever he’s picked up new tricks with WP and Genesis. Brad contributes to the WP Forums as well as a large commercial WordPress forum where posted over 10,000 responses.
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Those who can do… those who can also teach!
Users are contributing to Training Curriculum for people delivering WordPress in person courses… If you are delivering in person training, did you know you could source material from WordPress.org? Check it out on https://make.wordpress.org/training/ I follow along what they’re doing and they’re regularly asking for people to help contribute to this curriculum. If you’re a trainer with courseware to share, or are keen to help develop courseware, this is a great place to get involved.
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Kristen is a developer who’s building client sites, developing plugins, organising meet ups in Sydney and who also does face to face group WordPress training. She’s a co-organiser of this WordCamp too!
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Chris is doing WordPress training as well as building sites for himself and for clients. Chris is a meetup junkie, you can find him all over the meetup scene in Melbourne and organises an SEO meetup as well as helping organise the user branch of the Melbourne meet up.
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Users are organising meet-ups and sharing what they know with each other, each month around Australia. Melbourne has three meetups a month, a developer one, a user one and a meetup for and by women. Sydney has 3 meetups in the north, west and central city. Arranging meetups around geography is particularly important in a city as spread out as Sydney is. There are meet ups on the Gold and Sunshine Coasts, Brisbane, Perth, and Hobart. Wherever you are… there’s potential to gather others around you. So if there’s no meet up, and you want one, there’s every possibility that you won’t be the only one… so… maybe… you could start one!
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Sofia owns her own agency up in Brisbane and designs and builds sites for a wide range of clients. She’s just recently stepped up to help organise WordPress meet up Brisbane and spoke at both WordCamp Sydney 2012 and WordCamp Melbourne 2013.
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Luke works full time on a plugin that is helping developers keep track of how their clients are looking after their sites and works remotely for his company in the cafes of the Sunshine Coast. He spoke at WordCamp Welly this year and came home inspired to start off the Sunshine Coast meetup… so look out, WordCamps can be inspirational!!
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Japh is part of WordPress Australia’s ‘old guard’ and has contributed across so many areas in the time since he started with WordPress in ’06-’07. He’s spoken at WordCamps, organised meetups, written plugins, contributed to core, run a tutorial site, liaised between the community and a huge WordPress marketplace and is currently working full-time focusing on WordPress based products.
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Jason runs his own business in Canberra building and maintaining WordPress sites both here and overseas. He’s making inroads into getting WordPress used by government agencies, has released themes and collaborates on projects with other WordPress community members.
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And if it wasn’t enough that there are regular meetups, out of those meetups come WordCamps which have been a growing part of the WordPress Australia landscape since 2008. There is barely ever a weekend that goes by in the world in which there isn’t a WordCamp happening. They are a huge task to pull off but they’re incredibly rewarding to be a part of, so if there’s a WordCamp being planned near you, put your hand up help, the team needs all the help they can get…you can even start at this WordCamp by asking Wil and Kristen at any time if there’s anything you can to do!
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Tracey runs the Gold Coast Developer meet up and is a freelance designer/developer who’s been building with WordPress for years. She’s also one of the few people I know who’s delivered at talk at a WordCamp she helped organise. So she’s also crazy brave (emphasis on the brave)
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Jordan designs and develops bespoke websites for clients in WordPress and came to it the same way I did, and at the same time… Movable Type was changing into something less open and WordPress was the next best choice. Jordan contributes to the project by speaking at WordCamps, paying forward the advice and support he’s received too!
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Users are making WordPress more accessible; removing barriers that prevent access to WordPress websites by people with disabilities or who are using assistive technologies like screen readers or keyboard only navigation.
If you use assistive technology with WordPress, becoming a tester is a great way to be able to contribute to this incredibly important area; if you’re a coder who has interest and/or skills in accessibility they’re looking for capable people to help contribute to improve WordPress in this way.
I’m sorry to say I don’t know anyone contributing to the accessibility team from Australia, though I know people here have an interest in it. It’s an incredibly important part of building for the web and I believe there’s huge scope for not only contributing directly but maybe also in training and resourcing WordPress designers and devs in the field as well.
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The community is translating WordPress – there are 40 up to date localised versions of WordPress, there are 23 localised versions that need updating to version 4.0 and there are 74 that are yet to have a language pack made for them…
SO, if you speak Bulgarian… Czech, Macedonian, Tagalog, Mexican Spanish… these languages need people to update their files…If you speak Afrikaans, Hindi, Swiss German, Hong Kong Chinese, these locales need translations started… so get on that!
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Stephen Edgar fell into WordPress while maintaining a busy blog and community forum. To improve the experience of editing the blog he ported the site into WordPress. Keen to replicate the experience of improving the blog in the forums he then ported the site’s forum into the bbPress forums tool that works with WordPress. This whole journey has brought Stephen to the point where he’s now a bbPress core committer. What he learned working inside this significant part of the WP project has also led Stephen into helping the polyglot team where he’s helped build the Australian English version of WordPress.
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If you know about User Interface design and development, the core UI team work, predictably on WordPress’ UI. We all use it, and we actually have a chance to contribute meaningfully to that, even if it’s just initiating discussion about how we could make the UI better.
Here’s another area that I’m less familiar with an in which I didn’t find someone in AU taking part.
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The Meta team support the supporters… they build the WordPress.org site (which is where you start when you’re looking at contributing), they build the WordCamp theme and support the http://central.wordcamp.org/ website that all WordCamp sites are hosted on. Again, not across anyone from AU helping out here, but we’ve used the WordCamp theme before and it would be amazing to have someone contributing to making that as easy to use and customise for all WordCamp organisers!
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If you are more bent towards code, then you can contribute to WordPress by either making GPL themes for distribution in the WordPress repository or contributing to the theme review team who vet every single WordPress theme that gets contributed there. If you’re interested in contributing at this level, make sure you listen to Luke’s talk on WordPress Coding Standards as well.
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Michael has a full-time front end job in an agency and his WordPress contribution of themes to the .org repository are his hobby! Thanks Michael, that there are people making these things just to be given away is what makes the repo amazing!
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If you’re a plugin dev, you can release plugins into the WordPress repository for other people to use as well, and in the same way as you can review WordPress themes, plugin devs can also review plugins that are submitted.
There’s also scope here if you’re interested in adopting orphan plugins. These are plugins that are no longer in active development and have fallen by the wayside… Check out the Adopt Me tag where plugin devs who have no more time to keep updating their plugins make them available for others to take on. And if you find one in the repo that seems to have lapsed that you’re interested in looking after send a message to the plugin in team and they’ll touch base with the owner to see if it’s available for adoptions.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/adopt-me
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Maeve is a developer based over in Perth who’s come to WordCamp Sydney as a speaker!! Maybe at the next WordCamp that could be you! She also contributes at the Perth WordPress meet up. Maeve has 8 plugins in the repository with a combined download total of 219,530 downloads…
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Pete is a front end developer who’s worked on large and small-scale projects since he started web building in 1995 and he picked up WordPress again after a hiatus in 2008 when he started making use of it for client projects. While he doesn’t currently use it in his full time work he has a few plugins in the repository and tinkers around with WordPress front end development in his spare time. Pete helped organise WordCamp Melbourne 2014 and co organises the Melbourne meet up!
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The mobile team builds the iOS, Android, Windows, and Blackberry apps. They have a looooong shopping list… they’re keen to have Java, Objective-C, or C# skills as well designers, UX experts, and testers. They’re on a mission to give users a smooth experience on every device. As with all of these contribution possibilities you can find them on make.wordpress.org and follow their conversations, and contribute to them on the make blog or in IRC.
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The core team makes WordPress. Whether you’re a seasoned PHP developer or are just learning to code, They would love to have you on board. What a way to learn to code for WordPress, right at the coal face of its development. You can write code, fix bugs, debate decisions, and help with development. If you’re interested in taking part in this part of WordPress they have a tidy handbook on the make blog to get you started!
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Ryan McCue can’t possibly be old enough to have been a core contributor for 8 years so I think his survey entry was a typo. If it’s true, then he’s been doing it since he was… 13?? In recent times he’s been working on the REST API which is hoped will be included in version 4.1. This isn’t even his real gig… Ryan’s employed to work with a VIP agency working on sites for some rather big clients. Ryan’s given a huge amount of time to working on core, and not just his skill, but his commitment to WP and his contribution have opened up some big doors for him.
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SO, to recap, here are the ways you can get involved… starting at the less code heavy end of the spectrum and gradually building up towards core.
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So, how or where do you start?
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I’m glad you asked…
At the Make Blogs. http://make.wordpress.org
But before we go there… the story that I haven’t told you throughout this presentation is mine.
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Since 2009 I’ve gone from blogger, to developer, to trainer, to speaker and I owe all of it to this crazy awesome free software that we’ve all come here to learn about this weekend.
It is such a privilege it is to be able to stand up here and deliver a keynote talk when my first WordCamp was 2011 and I knew so little that I had people showing me demonstrations on notepaper to illustrate what the speaker was talking about, just so I could keep up.
You’re already making WordPress too, just by being here. If it’s your first time at a WordCamp, welcome. I hope the experience is every bit as exciting, mind-blowing and challenging as my first WordCamp was. If this is not your first WordCamp, if it’s your second, third, or even tenth, I hope the diversity of speakers, the new and interesting ways WordPress is being put to use inspires and challenges you too.
BUT, as I mentioned at the beginning, I’m not telling you all of this to give you an insight into how the project is put together… THIS is why I’m up here… THIS is my challenge to you while you’re listening to all the great people you’ll hear this weekend.
Don’t just ask WordPress can do for you… Ask also what YOU can do for WordPress.
Thank you.
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