The Perks of Contributing
Helen Hou-Sandi
Behold this glorious little section of the WordPress 3.3 credits page.
I’m never in anything for the recognition or glory, but I have to admit: this is pretty exciting. As of this writing, WordPress powers 15.7% of the top million websites and at least 22% of all new active websites in the US. That is a mind-blowing number of times that the faces and names on the credits page might be seen, even given that it’s buried a little in the admin.
In 3.2 I was among the list of names under Core Contributors, which was more than enough for me, but this is kind of like a promotion for me in the (very awesome) WordPress community. I get a little bit of community time within my job at 10up and have been meeting some really cool people, like Chexee, above. I’m extremely busy these days, between continuing to play piano (performance in a week!) and all this work, but I feel very satisfied. I’ve been doing a lot with UI bits; notable in this release is semi-responsive work on the themes screens and the About/post-Update page. I also did a fair bit of color scheme, RTL, and IE work toward the end, as they tend to get neglected. That said, I love front-end and UI work, but being more of a developer than a designer, I feel like it’s important to both learn and contribute as much as possible in all ways, so I’m continuing to dive into the WordPress codebase as a whole and get more confident tracing and patching things. I also find myself helping out in IRC or the forums here and there and do a little bit of ticket watching and cleanup on Trac. Speaking of Trac… once 3.3 gets out the door, I need to start hassling somebody about whether or not that little reskinning project of mine is going to go anywhere.
Here’s to the imminent release of 3.3 and more amazing things in 3.4 and beyond! And here’s a full screenshot of the credits page (as of just now), because everybody involved deserves credit. Whenever you update to 3.3, make sure to check out http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/credits.php. And please please please, do the update.
This post was cross-posted at Web Design Engineer Helen‘s blog.