Help Add A Contribute Tab In The WordPress About Section

Josh Pollock - January 26, 2015

For Christmas and New Years my wife and I drove to Phoenix to spend time with my mother and law and her husband. It was a great trip. On the way back, we got caught for two days in a snow storm in Western Texas.

We were so truly lucky to have found ourselves, after some of the most terrifying driving I have ever done, and a night spent on a highway off-ramp in Balmorhea, Texas–population 490. I say lucky because we spent the next twenty-four hours or so in this small town’s community center, with around a hundred other stranded travelers.

In response to a post on Facebook by the sheriff, people form the town showed up with food, blankets and cots. They worked to get the local news, Red Cross, and county government involved.

The whole experience was surprisingly not terrible. Why? Because the people in the town did enough to get the ball rolling, and empowered those of us who were stranded to do the rest. Instead of sitting around bored all day, we spent the day helping others. It was actually really nice.

Then I Saw The Tweets

When the storm finally cleared, we hit the road. My wife was behind the wheal, and I was checking Twitter of course. That’s when I found out that Kim Parsell had died.

As Chris Lema would say, “why am I telling you this?”

Well, even though I don’t think I ever directly interacted with Kim. Even at a distance she was an inspiration to me. She was a perfect example of someone whose involvement in the community not only led her to doing great things for our community, but encouraged others to do so as well.

The rest of the drive I was thinking about her and what I had learned about community in that small town in Texas. I have found that sometimes I can be an emotional coder, but it works. I once staved off a nervous breakdown by getting my head around object-oriented programming in JavaScript, but that’s another story…

To help me process my grief about the loss of Kim Parsell, I wrote a patch to add a contribute tab to the WordPress About section of the admin. I made it about ways that you can get involved in the WordPress project besides contributing to core.

I debated adding to the ticket why I was so compelled to do so at the time. I didn’t because I felt like it wasn’t right because I don’t think I ever interacted with her directly. I’m not even sure she knew who I was.

But there is one thing I do know about her, she didn’t just do great things for our community by her direct contributions to it. She inspired others to give back.

Her involvement had a multiplying effect.

I think that’s true, in different ways for all of use. I’ve said, every chance I get, that getting involved in the community, has for me has provided a vast return on investment of time for me.

It’s A Small Thing, But It’s Not

This one little thing, an extra tab in the screen people see after updating, or when clicking on the “About WordPress” link the W menu, it’s not a huge deal. But it kind of is. How does one get involved in this community and pay it forward for this great thing they have received for free? It’s not really obvious?

Aaron Campbell gave a great presentation on this topic at WordCamp DFW 2014. That talk was given to people who had already attended a WordCamp. But what about people who have no idea? The site make.wordcamp.org is an amazing resource, but how do we get people in the figurative door to that site, or the literal door to a WordPress Meetup or WordCamp?

Motivation isn’t about telling people what to do. It’s about helping them see a frame in which they believe they can do something. For people who can’t give back by contributing to core, we have to show them a variety of ways that they could give back, in hopes they see themselves in one of those opportunities.

Agree? Good. I Need Your Help

Here is what that screen looks like in with my initial patch:

23348-screenshot-2

When the ticket was removed from the 4.2 milestone, it was for lack of content direction and design, but the door was left open for the future.

I’ve already gotten some good feedback on content in the #outreach Slack channel. Specifically about beta testing and WordCamps. I would love to see more ideas about the content.

Also, I can’t agree more that the design itself needs work. Opposed to facilitating community management, design is not my wheelhouse. Compare the proposed “Contribute” tab to the existing “What’s New Tab” and you will see what I mean.

One good idea I have already received, from David Bisset, was to model it after the “Get Involved” flyer produced by Jen Mylo that you can see here.

 Help Me Make This Happen

Please let me know if you have ideas on content or design, in the comments here, or in the ticket itself. If you want to work on the design, I will be happy to do whatever it takes to make that happen. Get in touch with me via email, or via DM in WordPress Slack.

To make collaboration easier, I have posted the php file for the new tab. If you drop this file into wp-admin in your local development environment and then go to wp-admin/contribute.php you will see the new tab.

Thanks in advance for your help.