No matter how long one has been involved with a project, I find, there is always room to chat about the basics. So this week, inspired by a recent workshop on Learn.WordPress presented by @courtneypk and myself, I thought a project team map would be in order.
The WordPress open source project consists of a global community of people who collaborate on and contribute to the project. These volunteer contributors bring a variety of experience and skills, including software development, design, support, security, training, writing, localizing/translating, event organizing, and the list goes on.
The contributor community is organized into contributor teams. These teams can be sorted under the categories of Building, Operations, Extending, and Supporting.
Building
- Core – They write the code that is the “core” of the WordPress software.
- Design – Help design and develop the user interface for WordPress.
- Accessibility – Making WordPress & everything on WordPress.org accessible to people with disabilities.
- Meta – Help with the infrastructure that powers WordPress.org and WordCamp.org.
- Mobile – Help build the Mobile apps for WordPress.
- Test – Help patrol, test, and curate the WordPress experience via QA, testing, and user research.
Operations
- Marketing – Help develop the materials and resources to market the WordPress software and community.
- Hosting – Make WordPress hosting better for everyone through collaboration, tools, and documentation of best practices.
Extending
- Themes – Review incoming theme code to keep your theme directory in great shape.
- Polyglots – Translate all the things and maintain localized sites on WordPress.org.
- Plugins – Keep the plugin directory safe by reviewing code and ensuring standards.
- Tide – Learn how to make your plugin or theme more standardized, faster, and more secure.
- CLI – Contribute to WP-CLI, the official command line tool for managing your WordPress site.
Supporting
- Community – Bring people together with events (like meetups, WordCamps, and Contributor events). Outreach initiatives for diversity and inclusion.
- Documentation – Help write and edit documentation.
- Training – Create curricula for free WordPress training courses that people can trust.
- Support – Answer questions to help other WordPress users in the support forums and IRC.
- TV – Moderate incoming videos, help with post-processing, and transcribe/subtitle videos.
Whether you use this team map as a helpful reminder of who we are and what we’re doing, you learn about a team you didn’t know about, or you’re reminded of somewhere you might point someone to get involved or grow your involvement to another team, I hope this back to basics look at WordPress teams has been useful.
As we move into our third month of the Tuesday Trainings series I wanted to ask you, what kind of content would you like to see in this series? Please let me know in the comments! And if it’s something you’d like to volunteer to write, please let me know that too!