Overview

Table of contents

  • What skills do I need?
  • How much experience with WordPress do I need?
  • Which accounts do I need?
  • Places where the Docs team operates
  • When and where are meetings happening?
  • What type of meetings does the Docs team hold?
  • What contribution can I make after this onboarding session?
  • How do I work with GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ issues?
  • Show me documentation

What skills do I need?

  • English language

How much experience with WordPress do I need?

  • Anything in between none and a lot. The best documentation is written when you do things for the first time. Also, if you don’t have any experience with WordPress, then you are the best person to validate existing documentation and point to possible holes in it.

Which accounts do I need?

Places where the Docs team operates:

  • Blog – for meeting agendas and summaries (and anything related to the Docs team).
  • Slack channel #docs – where meetings are happening (and all communication regarding the team itself).
  • GitHub repository – where issues for all documentation are reported, discussed and worked on.
  • Handbook – how to contribute to the Documentation team (it’s a bit out of date).
  • Style guide – for how to write WordPress documentation.

When and where are meetings happening?
Meetings happen in #docs 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/. channel. Days and timing can be found in several places: The Welcome box (on the top of every page in this handbook or blog), the sidebarSidebar A sidebar in WordPress is referred to a widget-ready area used by WordPress themes to display information that is not a part of the main content. It is not always a vertical column on the side. It can be a horizontal rectangle below or above the content area, footer, header, or any where in the theme. on the blog page, global meeting calendar.

What type of meetings does the Docs team hold?

  • Regular meetings – in the form of chat in the Slack channel. These meetings are for project updates (showing off what you’ve been working on in documentation) and discussing any topics relevant to the team.
  • Issues triage – in the form of chat in the Slack channel. These meetings are for discussing GitHub issues: assigning, re-assigning, unblocking, helping assignees etc.
  • Online Contributor Days – in the form of conference calls over Zoom. These are 3 hours long, and we use them to work on GitHub issues, help new contributors get started, and discuss any problems contributors come across while working on these issues.

What contribution can I make after this onboarding session?

How do I work with GitHub issues?
There are two major ways to work on documentation GitHub issues:

  • create a new issue (you can also work on it if you want)
  • work on an existing issue

When you find anything wrong with WordPress documentation (it’s out of date, missing info, typo, dead link etc.), you can report it in our GitHub issue tracker by opening a new issue. At the time of writing this, we have three templates for creating a new issue. These templates will guide you on what information is needed for a good issue report.

  • Fix Doc Issue Report – for reporting issues with the existing documentation page.
  • New Doc Request – for proposing a new documentation page.
  • HelpHub Feedback reports – for issues reported via the HelpHub feedback form.

When you want to work on existing issues, you can browse them in a few ways:

  • the structured way – take a look at our project boards
  • the niche way – take a look at all the labels and find your niche
  • the brave way – just jump into all the issues and open the first one that looks interesting

Once you find the issue you want to work on, it is important to leave a comment in which you express interest in working on the issue (“I’d like to work on this” or something similar). This is needed because GitHub doesn’t allow us to assign issues to a random username that is not in WordPress organisation. There has to be some kind of connection between the username and the issue. If the issue you like is already assigned to someone else, but the last comment is older than 3-4 weeks, you can express interest in that issue as well as lack of activity means that the issue is probably abandoned.

Show me documentation
WordPress documentation is split into two major parts:

  • end-user documentation – general and blockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. editor
  • developer documentation – code reference, block editor, common APIs, themes, plugins, and advanced administration handbooks.

Team documentation is located in this handbook. Each team has their own handbook, which is maintained by the team itself.

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