New Contributors Meeting Recap – August 16th

Yesterday, the new weekly contributor meeting was held in the #core SlackSlack Slack is a Collaborative Group Chat Platform https://slack.com/. The WordPress community has its own Slack Channel at https://make.wordpress.org/chat/. room. Here is a recap of the meeting. A full chat log is also available.

Participants: @adamsilverstein @brainfork @clorith @davidmosterd @desrosj @dipeshkakadiya @drewapicture @flixos90 @geoffreyshilling @jnylen0 @johnbillion @joyously @justpeace @mikeschroder @milindmore22 @morganestes @mte90 @mrahmadawais @nabil_kadimi @sergey @stevenkword @zakkath

Discussion Highlights

Documentation on coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. unit testunit test Code written to test a small piece of code or functionality within a larger application. Everything from themes to WordPress core have a series of unit tests. Also see regression. suite

  • There’s currently no documentation on the core unit testing suite in the handbook.
  • The current and best method for learning is to read some of the existing tests and see how they do it. With specific questions, @boone and @johnbillion are always good people to go to.
  • Several developers indicated their interest in working on an introduction or documentation for it. Any results will be published in a future meeting.

Documentation on contributing with GitGit Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. Git is easy to learn and has a tiny footprint with lightning fast performance. Most modern plugin and theme development is being done with this version control system. https://git-scm.com/.

  • Documentation on Git contributions is still lacking. Most typical handbook pages with patchpatch A special text file that describes changes to code, by identifying the files and lines which are added, removed, and altered. It may also be referred to as a diff. A patch can be applied to a codebase for testing. instructions only reference SVNSVN Subversion, the popular version control system (VCS) by the Apache project, used by WordPress to manage changes to its codebase. commands and don’t have Git examples. @morganestes will start working on consolidating pages and instructions and would love to have some guidance on contributing tests as part of that.
  • @jnylen0 shared a handbook page specific to contributing with Git.

Documentation on getting started with contributing

  • There’s not a very good “Getting Started” documentation in the handbook. It throws several things at you in different pages. You can learn how things technically work, but not really how to get started from a workflow/mindest point of view.
  • @adamsilverstein shared what is probably the best “Getting Started” page for core contributing.
  • However where you start, to a large extent depends on your preferences. It’s important to find one or two areas of core in which you’re most interested in and concentrate on those first.
  • To get a feeling for what is being worked on and how these processes work, participating or even just lurking in meetings can help a lot. Show up to some dev chats, and other component meetings you’re interested in.
  • If you don’t need to do it remotely and have the possibility to attend a WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They're one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more., probably the best way to start is attending a contributor dayContributor Day Contributor Days are standalone days, frequently held before or after WordCamps but they can also happen at any time. They are events where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/ There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus. https://2017.us.wordcamp.org/contributor-day/ https://make.wordpress.org/support/handbook/getting-started/getting-started-at-a-contributor-day/.. The in-person communication has huge benefits, especially for the beginning.

Moving tickets forward

  • Persistence is generally key in keeping your patches moving on tracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress.. Knowing who to pingPing The act of sending a very small amount of data to an end point. Ping is used in computer science to illicit a response from a target server to test it’s connection. Ping is also a term used by Slack users to @ someone or send them a direct message (DM). Users might say something along the lines of “Ping me when the meeting starts.” and how often can take you a long way. Start with the component maintainers and work out to the core developers. Ask for feedback at a dev chat, or if you don’t want to jump in yourself ask whomever is running dev chats to toss out the ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. for public discussion.
  • Ping specific people, don’t worry about being annoying or anything. It can happen that someone is short on time and does not respond immediately, and that may feel like a bummer. But every core developer is trying to help, so do not hesitate being persistent. Actually, component maintainters and core devs expect to get pinged and try to make core contributing as welcome as possible.
  • The easiest way to get in touch is commonly in a component meeting if there is one. But if there is none, pinging a maintainer is the way to go.

Changing workflow keywords on tickets

  • Everyone can and should properly apply and modify workflow keywords on a ticket. Here are some examples:
    • If you add a patch, add the has-patch keyword if it isn’t set yet.
    • If you provide tests, add the has-unit-tests keyword if it isn’t set yet.
    • If you feel a patch is rather complex, feel free to add dev-feedback.
  • If you aren’t sure that your patch addresses the issue, or if you don’t feel that you understand the issue well, it’s best to let someone else look and change the keywords appropriately. But also no worries, if you accidentally or mistakenly set a “wrong” keyword.

Next Week’s Meeting

The next meeting will take place in the #core slack channel on Wednesday, August 23, 19:00 UTC. Please feel free to drop in with any questions or tickets you’d like to discuss!

Thanks to everyone that attended! As always, please feel free to leave a comment below or reach out to any of the moderators (@adamsilverstein, @desrosj, @stevenkword, @welcher) with questions on Slack. Or, as mentioned above, to any core developer or component maintainer with questions specific to certain core areas.

#new-contributors, #summary