This guide is intended to help you get started contributing to the support team at a contributor day. Below is an outline of what the Support team does, and how to quickly get started contributing to WordPress support. If you need any help, talk to your contributor day organizer, or ask your question in #forums on Slack.
Regular Meeting Time: Every other Thursday, 17:00 UTC
Chat Room: #forums channel on Slack
Support responsibilities
The responsibilities of the support team are:
- Helping in the WordPress Support Forums by answering questions
- Helping in the #wordpress IRC channel
- Providing guidance and answering questions related to the forums in the #forums channel on Slack
- Providing guidance in general – the majority of the users in the WP forums are in over their heads and they need a little guidance
Common Tasks
As a member of the Support team, some common tasks that you’ll carry out are:
- Answer questions in the WordPress support forums
- Look for topics that you can contribute to, based on your experience level
- Keep the conversation positive
- Keep replies on topic
- Monitor IRC and answer questions as they appear
- Usually the questions will be more complex, but some will be easy
- Because IRC is live chat, be ready to reply immediately
- Note documentation/handbook articles that need to be improved, and update them with relevant information
- Many of these articles will be used in both the forums and IRC
Prior Knowledge
Helping in support doesn’t require a lot of PHP experience, but knowledge that you’ll find helpful for working in support is:
- Knowing something about how WordPress works from a user’s perspective. This includes usage of themes, plugins, the site and block editors, etc.
- Knowing a few basic concepts such as actions and filters
- An understanding of the basics of CSS
- An understanding of testing and debugging
- A patient attitude: Remember that it’s not easy for people to ask for help
Tools
- A basic text editor
- A local development environment or a self-hosted site you’re willing to test things on, would be handy. A newer alternative is WP Playground, which runs entirely in-browser, and provides a WP instance to test things out.
- IRC client – or the easiest way is to access in your browser: web.libera.chat
- Familiarize yourself with IRC tools – i.e. type in a code, and it will produce a link to a plugin or codex article
Essential Reading
- Know your way around the WordPress Documentation and Developer documentation, so you can quickly look things up when necessary
First Steps
To help out on the support forums:
- Sign up for a WordPress.org account
- Browse through the support forums to see what you can help out with, especially the No Replies section of the forums
To help out in IRC:
- Select an IRC client
- Log in to irc.libera.chat, channel #wordpress. More information is available in this handbook article about IRC.
- Help someone out with an answer to their question
Tasks
Some easy tasks for a first-time contributor to get started at a contributor day are:
- Join the #WordPress IRC channel and help answer questions
- Join the #forums channel on Slack to communicate with other volunteers.
- Head to the No Replies link in the forums and start answer threads that haven’t received any attention