 My name is Morgan Estes. I've been a contributor since 2009 to WordPress, and I fully never intended to. There are six talks covering WordPress while we're here, or contributing to WordPress. So I want to take a second to highlight what I'm talking about when I mention contributing. So giving, helping, and writing. You ready? All right, let's begin. So at church, we have to talk about the three T's of giving, time, talent, and treasure. And there are different ways of defining those. For me, it's things like spending time coordinating word camps, speaking at your local meetup. It's finding the area that you're talented in and doing something to make it better. So something like design, or translation, or video production, or closed captioning, if you like to type and watch videos. For your treasure, you can do things like donating to plugin and theme authors. They love money. Donating scholarships to attend word camps. Or has anyone ever bought a ticket to attend a word camp? Hey, you donated money to the WordPress Foundation. Thank you. So as an extra bonus, if you run a business, you can encourage your employees to donate their time. You can offer them time on the clock to be able to contribute. That is a huge benefit that employers can provide their people. And to quote Daniel Tiger, the great philosopher, you can be a big helper in your family. I've got a four-year-old, so if it's not on PBS, I don't really know what it happens. So Daniel Tiger encourages helping. So does WordPress. Things like the support forums in IRC. When I first started contributing to WordPress, it was by sitting in IRC and chatting with people who had problems. I didn't know the answers, but I could sure look them up because I'm really good at Google. And that led to finding great answers on the Codex that were wrong. And so I started helping out in the Codex. You can do things like working out at the happiness bar and helping people by mentoring. There's programs like WP Mentor. Or at my local library, there's a literacy program for seniors. What better way to teach seniors internet literacy and literacy in general than by logging on WordPress? So writing and WordPress go together like peas and carrots or like pants and boots. Anyone beatbox? Pants and boots, pants and boots, pants and boots. Okay, so that's how you learn to beatbox. You're getting little tidbits that you never wanted. So things like writing to provide the Codex. Updates to the Codex or don't write to the Codex because it's going away. Get rid of Codex and instead contribute code to the Dev Hub to people who are looking for, hey, what's this function do? I don't know. Well, here's an example of someone who used it. Fantastic. Did you know that this is really weird? In addition to things like building apps, building themes and plugins and fantastic amazing data-driven things that WordPress does, you can use it to blog. I've heard of this thing. It's WordPress blogging. Anyway, sarcasm is not a great tool of mine. But you can blog about the awesome things that you do with WordPress. And people will read it and learn from it. It's an amazing way to write. One of my favorite ways that you can contribute by writing is by writing bug reports on track. How many of you have ever used WordPress and found something that you just hated because it was broken? Yay, I work with WordPress every day. That's how I contribute mostly because I hate some things. And you can write great bug reports. You don't have to have the fix. I learned that from some guy named Eric Mann a few years ago when I was listening to a podcast where this dude just talked about not contributing to WordPress through code, but by reporting bugs and then testing other people's stuff. I thought, who is this weirdo? Well, now he's my lead engineer. Okay, but why? Well, Zoid Berg, I'll tell you. You can solve problems, build community and change the world. So, this is a story all about how my life got flipped turned upside down. I'd like to take a minute, so just sit right there and I'll tell you how I became a WordPress contributor. I was working for some lawyers in OKC trying to convince them to switch to WP, but they thought it was all just hype because they couldn't upload their favorite file type. So, after hacking core files and losing my changes, I submitted a patch and waited for what seemed like ages. What I didn't know at the time was about filters and actions, and instead of writing rhymes, I could have written a plugin. Yeah, code is poetry, my rhymes are not. Okay, so, there are two, there are things called filters and hooks in WordPress because people smarter than me have put in places where I can just modify the code with a plugin. I don't need to write a big patch to fix my one stupid problem. So, the functionality already existed in WordPress and the lead developers at the time could have just said, you're an idiot. The functionality exists in WordPress, go use it. But here it is, this is my first patch. All four lines of it, 60 characters, including an unrelated chunk of code that was graciously included because it was my first one and I didn't know, you're only supposed to submit a patch and fix for one thing at a time. The friendliness of the dev team made me want to continue contributing. They asked a question, hey, why'd you do that? And I'm like, oh, because it was there? All right, it didn't kill anything so they were nice and let me. So, solve my problem, king of the world, except really how it was more like for me to just chill and rely on it. I have to be honest, at that point I didn't think of myself as a contributor to WordPress. I just had this itch that needed to go away before I could convince my bosses that WordPress was a good platform. I ended up helping to make WordPress a more useful tool for thousands of attorneys and the three other WordPerfect users in the world. That's all my patch did was allow you to upload WordPerfect to your site. Lawyers love WordPerfect. Hated WordPress because they couldn't use WordPerfect. They had other problems in WordPress if they're using WordPerfect on a daily basis. So, they switched to Word because that totally helped. So, building communities, communities turn to WordPress because it makes creating a website affordable and easy. Plugins like BuddyPress and BBPress combine to form powerful community building software. One example of that is the CityMoms blog network which is a massive multi-site network with sites for individual cities. So, each city is managed by locals. It's a way for moms and dads to coordinate, meet and get to know each other and their city. I've interviewed the people who run the OKC Moms blog where I grew up, where I grew up. I live in Oklahoma City and I asked them to come speak at our WordPress meetup and they said, what's that? Well, WordPress runs your website, huh? They don't care that they're on WordPress. They just care that they have this really cool tool that they can log into and use it to build to communicate with their community that they've already have established. Your minor one-off, this thing bugs me, contributions help people like that to build up their communities. And WordPress will let you change the world. So when you contribute to WordPress, remember, you know, there's this big magic number, WordPress powers 25% of the web. But on WordPress.com alone, over 409 million people view more than 20.4 billion pages each month according to their activity page. One, multi-site install, giving voice to 409 million people viewing things. It has a deep impact on what you do. That doesn't count all the individual things. So sites, organizations like Water for Life, American Red Cross, A Village of Hope and the Free Burma Rangers, they use WordPress because your contributions make WordPress a platform that is easy to install across a variety of systems on your phone, on PHP 5.2, I'm sorry. Things that just seem kind of ridiculous when you start getting in the nerdy technical stuff, they don't care. They know that they can quickly, effectively and cheaply communicate with people who are interested in what they're doing on a near, instantaneous basis. When you contribute to WordPress, everything is awesome. Well, truth is sometimes it's not. Sometimes you have a hard time. You experience burnout, you're less than supportive. Listen, changing your mind doesn't mean you failed. It just means that that particular itch may have already been sufficiently scratched for you. If you're interested in contributing to WordPress, say you're sold, Dr. Hume, talk to me. My name is Morgan. Among other things, I am a WordPress contributor. Stick around to hear Luke and Rich come out to the Get Involved table and talk to me. Often the hardest thing about contributing is taking that first step and you've already done it. You're sitting in this room. Congratulations, your contributors. Come meet with me. We'll change the world together through WordPress. Thank you very much. Thank you.