Running New Contributor Meetings

This is a general script for running new contributor meetings, feel free to edit as you see fit.


/here <new-contributor-meeting> :wave: Hello everyone! Who’s around for the new contributor meeting?

Great! Anyone attending for the first time?

Awesome, welcome everyone!

Let’s do an open floor section for general questions for the first 20-30 minutes, and then switch to questions on specific tickets for the remainder of the meeting. We usually end 10-15 minutes before the top of the hour to leave a little breathing room for the weekly dev chat.

@desrosj, @flixos90, @adamsilverstein, @welcher, @audrasjb, @costdev, @mike, @OGlekler, and @sergey are facilitators for these meetings. If you have any questions after the meeting, or anything that you are uncomfortable asking here, you are more than welcome 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.” us throughout the week.

If you have any feedback or ideas on making these meetings more helpful, please do suggest 🙂

WordPress CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. Contributor Handbook has a great FAQ that should help you get started:
https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/tutorials/faq-for-new-contributors/

Does anyone have questions about submitting patches, working with TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress., deciding which tickets to work on, or contributing to core in general?



Just in case any new contributors are looking for some bugs to fix, this handbook section suggests some ideas:
https://make.wordpress.org/core/handbook/contribute/fixing-bugs/#finding-bugs-to-fix

Generally, I would recommend looking at the list of “good first bugs” to get started: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/tickets/good-first-bugs

And here is a similar list of “good first issues” for Gutenberg: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/contribute

If you’re on Twitter, you can follow https://twitter.com/GoodFirstBugs as well 🙂

These are well-contained tasks designed to help you get familiar with WordPress core code, processes, and contributing, and not send you down a rabbit hole 🙂



If nothing catches your eye on the “good first bugs” list, I would suggest looking at the tickets marked as needs-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., needs-testing, needs-design, or needs-design-feedback in the current milestone (6.2):
https://core.trac.wordpress.org/query?status=!closed&keywords=~good-first-bug&keywords=~needs-patch&keywords=~needs-testing&keywords=~needs-design&keywords=~needs-design-feedback&group=milestone&order=priority

And here you can find all tickets currently slated for the next major releasemajor release A release, identified by the first two numbers (3.6), which is the focus of a full release cycle and feature development. WordPress uses decimaling count for major release versions, so 2.8, 2.9, 3.0, and 3.1 are sequential and comparable in scope.:
https://core.trac.wordpress.org/tickets/major/workflow

Those are the ones that have a higher priority and need some attention.



If you’re interested in triaging, take a look at the tickets that are in the Awaiting Review or Future Release milestone, and see what is needed to move them one step closer to resolution:
https://core.trac.wordpress.org/tickets/future



Also wanted to note that writing code is just one of many ways to contribute, it’s perfectly OK to start with testing the current betaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. version or nightly build, triaging tickets, adding missing docs, fixing a typo, participating in test scrubs or bugbug A bug is an error or unexpected result. Performance improvements, code optimization, and are considered enhancements, not defects. After feature freeze, only bugs are dealt with, with regressions (adverse changes from the previous version) being the highest priority. scrubs in #core-test, etc. 🐛

For tickets that already have a patch, testing an existing patch and giving feedback is also a great way to move them forward 🛣️



Some tickets can have multiple patches iterating on a solution or exploring different approaches.

You can just pick a ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. you’re interested in and start working 🙂 Before making significant time investments though, it might be a good idea to ask for an advice in the comments, or here in #core.

Some ideas to get more eyes on a ticket once you think it’s ready: pinging the component maintainer for a review in the ticket comments, or bringing it up here in #core any time outside of any ongoing meeting (or in the open floor section of the weekly dev meeting).



I’ll pause for any questions now. There are no wrong questions here, don’t be shy, the community is here to support you :wordpress: :community: 🤗



If there are no other questions for now, we can open the floor for tickets.

Any specific tickets you’d like to discuss? Let’s see if some of them could be an easy fix 🙂



All right, unless anyone has a ticket to bring up, let’s take a look at “good first bugs” that haven’t been modified in a while:
https://core.trac.wordpress.org/query?status=!closed&keywords=~good-first-bug&order=changetime



Any other tickets anyone has questions on or would like to discuss?



Alright, we’re at 10 minutes to mark. Going to close out the meeting to allow everyone to take a short break. :coffee: :tea: :cookie: The weekly Core Dev Chat will start at the top of the hour. Everyone is welcome to stick around for it. Again, please feel free to reach out to any of us that run these meetings. ❤️ :community:

Per https://make.wordpress.org/meetings/, the next meeting is in two weeks, August 12, same time as today (19:00 UTC). If you have any questions on contributing to core before that, bring them up here in #core any time outside of any ongoing meeting, or in the open floor section of the weekly dev chat, and someone should follow up.

</new-contributor-meeting>

Thanks everyone! Happy contributing! 🙌 💪 :wordpress: :community:

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