Looking for a lead
The Core Contributor Handbook is live here, and has a lot of great content from a number of contributors already:
http://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/
What we’re looking for is someone to “own” the CCH and be responsible for:
- Expanding and editing it, getting feedback from devs.
- Walking people through it to get ideas on how to improve it (and get people involved with WP!).
- Soliciting other contributors (don’t want a one-person show) and keeping an eye on all the changes.
- Figure out a cool way to package and print the handbook.
Let me know if you’re interested in taking on this role, a comment on this post is fine.
This also reminds me — it would be great to be able to see a feed of changes on a site, like edits to a page. Anyone have a favorite plugin there?
dremeda 12:19 am on July 28, 2012 Permalink
Good stuff, Matt. I would like to contribute here. Whoever ends up owning it, you have your first contributor/volunteer.
Ben Tremblay 1:48 am on July 28, 2012 Permalink
Detail: that URL was not clickable in EMail. ThunderBird is pretty well behaved with that sorta thing.
Odd it wasn’t a live link.
Links in header and footer were just fine.
dllh 2:24 am on July 28, 2012 Permalink
Can you clarify what level of involvement with the community the lead for this should have had to date? For example, I’ve gotten a few patches in here and there but don’t know that I’m sufficiently familiar with all the things to be a useful lead on something like this. Wouldn’t surprise me to learn that others who’re interested in pitching in have similar feelings. Are you hoping to land somebody who already has a solid insider view of things or are you after a fresh perspective?
Matt Mullenweg 2:01 pm on July 28, 2012 Permalink
I don’t think being super-involved in core is necessary, in fact it’s probably better to have a beginners mind with regard to much of this. However you’ll want to run things by folks with more experience just to make sure you’re leading people on the right track.
Emil Uzelac 2:55 am on July 28, 2012 Permalink
Good stuff indeed
Tom Auger 5:16 am on July 28, 2012 Permalink
Boy oh boy, this is such an important piece of the WordPress puzzle! My own journey (still in its infancy) in becoming a useful contributor has been fraught with good intentions and big learning curves. If I had more experience I’d definitely volunteer to shepherd this thing into a true roadmap for the would-be contributor.
Mike Bijon 9:37 am on July 28, 2012 Permalink
Hi Matt, I’d like to be considered for this position too. I’m a 1-time core contributor and have worked with the PDX WP Meetup and Codex lately. More details, http://www.mbijon.com/about-mike-bijon/. Now that I’m not a full-time developer at work, and take on a lot more planning & PMing tasks, I think I could be a lot more productive with this than I’ve been with trying to make rare, quiet coding windows.
Also, for tracking changes to the CCH:
Audit Trail has most of what you need, http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/audit-trail/, but would have to be turned into a feed. Adding some open diff tools could help make it more readable, http://www.raymondhill.net/blog/?p=441, or https://github.com/austincheney/Pretty-Diff. Although what would be interesting is to build a way to deploy all content via a git or Github repo, http://drupal.org/project/content_staging (which would also solve a lot of commercial users’ Dev > Production deploy problems).
Japh 1:34 pm on July 28, 2012 Permalink
Hey Matt, the Core Contributor Handbook is already an excellent resource, and I’d love to see it grow even further.
I would also like more information about what your expectations are for this role. Specifically, how much experience with core contribution do you feel is necessary? How much time per week do you expect this role will require?
Matt Mullenweg 2:02 pm on July 28, 2012 Permalink
Answered the experience question above. As for time, I would plan for 10 hours a week as a good baseline, as with any serious volunteer commitment across WordPress.
Siobhan 3:59 pm on July 28, 2012 Permalink
Hi Matt – I’d love to help out with this. I was looking at it before and wondering if you needed someone to help out.
I’m a documentation specialist (http://wordsforwp.com) and I spend a lot of time communicating with devs and translating what they say into beginner speak. I build a lot of documentation projects from the ground up, and work with a lot of developers on similar projects to this, so it’s right up my street. I’d be more than happy to get involved. My time is a little limited over the next few weeks but as of the end of August I have 10 hours per week for sure.
Andrea Rennick 10:33 pm on July 29, 2012 Permalink
I’d vouch for Siobhan having the chops to take the lead on this.
Marcus 9:06 am on July 31, 2012 Permalink
same
masonjames 7:24 pm on July 31, 2012 Permalink
+1
Azizur Rahman 5:22 pm on July 28, 2012 Permalink
Hi Matt, count me in to be one of the volunteer. I don’t think I can do 10 hours at the moment to take a lead, due to my other volunteering commitment at the moment. I am happy to be supporting whoever ends up taking the lead.
Beau Lebens 10:59 pm on July 29, 2012 Permalink
If anyone is planning on coming to the Dev Day for WCSF, I plan on making contributions to the CCH part of the action for the day.
Devin Reams 2:09 pm on July 30, 2012 Permalink
Great! I’ll be sure to stop by and lend a hand…
Chris Olbekson 1:33 am on August 2, 2012 Permalink
I would love to help where ever possible on this. I think the perfect plugin to help manage the project is Edit Flow http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/edit-flow/. I’m not sure if it has a feed but the notifications and editorial comments will be very helpful.
Doug Provencio 9:27 pm on August 5, 2012 Permalink
I added a section called Suggestions, for people to add suggestions about Missing Sections, Style and Navigations, and Sections still needing major work.
Do we want to break off a list of which pages still need work (and who’s working on them) onto its own page?