 Thanks very much for coming along. To do this type of presentation, it's not really a techy thing. It's just about giving stuff back to the community. So thanks all for coming today. So let's jump into it. It took me ages to do that. I think it's great, isn't it? So who remembers a few years back, Matt, in his 2014, I think it was a work camp in Europe? Somebody asked him, you know what? How much should we contribute back to WordPress? And he wrote a blog post about it. And he said, well, basically from organizations, it would be great if they could contribute 5% of their people back to something to do with WordPress core. And I know a lot of the big companies do that. And I don't do a lot more than that. But work camps aren't just about big organizations. They're all about individuals. And you guys are all individuals. So what does it really mean for us as individuals? So I turned the question round about it. I asked, well, what does WordPress give us as individuals? Well, it gives us a voice. We may not take that for granted here in Australia. But think about countries that are a bit more repressed. Think of a place like Iran and Syria, China, where people can't speak freely. So if they have WordPress, if they have that option to give them a voice, it's a really, really strong thing. For a lot of us, it gives us a career. And with career, it gives us an income. So WordPress can be responsible for that as well. WordPress is a place to learn new skills. Just think about all the blogs, all the podcasts, all the blogs, all the tutorials, stuff that's hosted on WordPress sites. So it gives us that skill set. And it gives us a community. All of us here today, we're a WordPress community. And out of communities, we get long-lasting friendships and business colleagues as well. So I think WordPress gives us an awful lot back. So again, turn the question on its head. What can I give back to WordPress? And in the same post, Matt summed up quite nicely. And we said basically whatever might be that helps the WordPress mission move forward. And I think he chose the word mission quite on purpose. So mission, he didn't say the WordPress app. He didn't say code. He didn't say Gutenberg or themes or plugins. He said the WordPress mission. And mission's a broader sense. It encompasses everything to do with WordPress. So let's dive in and have a look at some of the things that we can use to contribute back to WordPress. So I think when you talk to people about contributing to WordPress, the first thing that pops into the head is contributing to code, to the code. So let's look at that just now and we'll get that one over and done with first. So that's something that you think you want to do. You need to get used to a system called track. Track is where we store tickets for PHP core development. It's an issue tracking and wiki system. Within track, you can follow the timeline of development. So even if you don't want to get involved in development and you want to see what they're doing on a day-to-day basis, you've got a timeline there so you can see all the new features and everything that's being added. And of course, if you want to do development to core, that's where you contribute to all the open tickets that are there. So if you're new to this, if you've not done it before, there's a good section in track. It's called Good First Bugs. And these bugs, they're very, very simple. They're not huge coding stuff. And it's more about getting used to the track system. So introducing it into how to create a ticket, update a ticket, submit one, do all the reviewing and patching and stuff like that, rather than concentrate on the actual PHP bug itself. So my slides here, they'll all be available later after the conference. So they've all got links about the different areas. At the bottom is usually the main link. So I've got a link there to make WordPress.org in the handbook, the core handbook to there. So links throughout all the slides. So let's look into a little bit more depth about contributing to core. So that's track, that's the development timeline. So you can see it's all chronological based, all the stuff that they're working on. So you can scroll through that. That's one of the main views for track. So you've got the ticket number, the description, milestones as well that it's gonna be released into. The types of as a defect or enhancement. So you can get a fairly good overview of those. And that's just like a single ticket there with some information on the top. But for the process at high level, if you wanna contribute to the code, what you're gonna have to do is build a local development environment. And you download the latest version of WordPress from something called Subversion, which is a version repository. It can be a lot of new terms. You're gonna hear these next two slides. And once you download that, you might get a bit of a shock because that's not WordPress. Once you download and unzip it, you'll find a source directory. So there's no WordPress install there. So what you've got to do then is build WordPress from all these source components. And that uses tools called Node.js, NPM and Grunt as a task runner. These might be terms that are unfamiliar to you, so you might do a little bit of research on that. But basically once you build that, you'll find a folder called build and that's where your WordPress installation is. So you wanna configure that like a normal WordPress installation. You wanna make sure you got a clean repository. So no patches, nothing there. And to do that, use SVN tools like diff, revert, up and grunt. Again, more words, so you need to do a little research on. This is high level. So once you've got a nice clean WordPress installation, if you look at the ticket, if someone has already done a patch, you need to apply that patch so that your WordPress is up to date with that ticket. So now you can start your development and testing. So you can apply your code, you can apply your changes, you can see all your testing with PHP unit. And once you're finished, once you've fixed that bug, done that enhancement, then you need to create a patch file. That's the difference, that's the stuff that you've done. And then attach that patch up to the ticket and submit it for review. And then basically rinse, oh, basically rinse and repeat. There we go, cut. Rinse and repeat, make sure your SVN repository is all clean again for the next ticket. Just keep cutting it. Can we have another mic? No, okay, I'll just keep going. I'll just shout. Okay, so that was subversion, as well as subversion. If you're looking to contribute to Gutenberg, the new block editor, that's all actually done on GitHub. It's a lot of JavaScript libraries, so if you wanna get involved in that, jump on to GitHub, and that's the link there for GitHub. If you need help with all this, there's a lot of new stuff there. These are the links for the help. So definitely go on wordpress.slack.com. There's lots of channels there. There's lots of core channels. These are the ones that I'm usually subscribed to. So core, core.js, core.editor for the Gutenberg, which has been very busy over the past few months. You've got PHP and the REST API. There's about 20, 30 different channels there. You can all get help in Slack. Okay, so that's contributed to core PHP. Let's get that one out of the way. So here's some other stuff that you can help with the WordPress mission, the WordPress project. So plugin and theme devs. They're huge parts of WordPress. Obviously, they extend the functionality. There's always new services. There's always new APIs coming along for WordPress that you need to integrate with. There's new niches as well, so you might find a particular community that requires something you need to do. Or there could be a particular functionality that comes out of a project that you can spin off into a plugin. So if that's something you wanna contribute to, basically what you do is you create your plugin the first time, you zip it up into a zip file, and then you submit it to the plugin review team. What they'll do is they'll run all the stuff in the background. If it's successful, if you think it's worthy of being in the directory, then they'll create an SBN repository for you and your username and password, and then development from there on is under SBN for that. So there's a link to that. Plugins.wordpress.org. There's a make channel as well for plugins and on Slack, the plugin review as well. Themes as well. So if you're not a plugin developer, if you're more creative and you wanna do some designs, you can do some theme development. So there's always new devices on market every year. There's new iPhone or new Samsung with new resolutions that you need to update your themes to. There's always new design concepts that come out as well. And again, same as plugins, new niches and new people, different communities that are looking for different types of themes. The process for themes is very similar. You zip up your theme once you're finished doing it and you submit that for review. And then once that's approved, then you'll get an email and they'll move that into directory. But if you are looking to develop theme, there's a couple of plugins that are quite useful. One is called the theme check plugin. So if you are gonna do theme development, then you need to install the theme check plugin. And that, the background just goes through all the different aspects that are needed for the theme review just to make sure it's okay before you go and review it. And then a link there to the theme upload file link as well. There's a reference on make.wordpress.org slash themes. That's the main place to go. And as always, a Slack channel theme review if you want some help with doing that. Testing and reviewing. So if you're not a developer, if you wanna do something else, like rather than actual development, you can always help out with testing. And reviewing as well. So we're looking at raising the quality of the WordPress experience when you start testing. If you're still a developer, but wanna help out in the testing point of view, if you don't actually wanna write the functions, then you can help with the automated testing with tickets and plugins and themes. So you can run things like Q unit, which is the JavaScript tests, and PHP unit, which is the PHP testing. So you can run those against tickets and plugins and things if you want to help out that way. If you wanna do some beta testing. So WordPress has always got a new version that's coming out. Version five is very, very close. But there's always a pre-release version there. You can fancy yourself as a beta tester. You can download the latest nightly build. And then once you've got the latest build, you can install the WordPress beta tester plugin there and get on testing. Just have a look around, see if you can find some bugs and report those to track. And that could be your contribution to WordPress. So as well as development and beta testing, there's also user testing as well. So we're talking about functionality, the user interface. So you can have a look at the new builds and see about the new features, are the buttons okay? What about the menus? You know, it's actually usable from that point of view. And of course the big change that's coming to WordPress soon is Gutenberg. So if you wanna have a play around with Gutenberg from the UI point of view for the user testing, then go ahead and download the nightly builds and have a play around with that. Gutenberg has caught a lot of attention recently. It's gonna be a huge change. So definitely if you are looking to do some user testing, that's a big error that definitely needs a lot of testing over the next few releases. There's a few links at the bottom. There's the make slash test, there's the core slash test channel as well. And there's a core handbook link there to testing. So theme reviewing as well. We talked about theme development and once you've finished theme development, you put it up for review. Well there's a team there that looks at all the themes. So nothing goes in the theme directly unless it has a review. And on their page, they say that basically the team is open to anyone. So you can join today if you want to do some theme testing. These guys look after the review requirements. So list that you need to require before you can submit and it gets put in the directory. And they also look after the unit test for the theme as well and the plugin. So let's look at accessibility. So accessibility is really, really important with WordPress. We want WordPress to be able to use by everyone and that includes people who need to use it accessible. So there's something called a WordPress accessibility coding standards. On their page, the team looks after this. They basically say that this is their mission statement. All new updated code, they're losing WordPress must conform with the WCAG that's the Web Content Accessibility Guides at level AA. Now I'm not going to go into that. There's a lengthy document. There's a link there that tells you what that means to be AA certified. But that's the accessibility team's mission statement. So they are looking for people who know how to test in the accessibility field and know how to use the assistive technology like screen readers and things like that. So if you've got experience with that, that's definitely something you can use to contribute back to WordPress if you're not a developer or anything else. You can test existing patches, existing track tickets there. You can test those. Or you can jump straight in with Gutenberg. There's been quite a lot in the press recently about accessibility in Gutenberg. A lot of talk recently. So why not jump in if that's your particular area? Download WordPress 5 pre-release and get testing on accessibility and make sure it's right when 5 comes along. Hey, reporting bugs. So with usability, we need stability as well. So WordPress needs to be stable. We can't have it crashing all the time. Otherwise people are not gonna go to it. So reporting bugs is a really, really important task to do. And with WordPress, there's millions and millions of lines of code. So let's get real. You know, there's gonna be bugs. It'd be lovely if it was perfect to have it straight out of the package, but we know there's gonna be bugs here and there. So if you are reporting a bug, it's very, very important to make sure that WordPress is the actual cause for that. So there's a couple of ways you can do that. If you got installed WordPress, you can install something called the debug bar. The debug bar just, I guess, you have a separate window and it shows you all the output that WordPress plugins and the theme files generate. So if there's any issue, if you think you've found a bug, install that plugin and then have a look in the debug panel and it'll tell you all the PHP warnings and errors that are being thrown out. So make sure it is WordPress that has generated an error before you go and submit a bug. There's a little script. If you're a developer on GitHub, it's called the backtrace script and that can help you find where the error is exactly coming from. There's nothing worse than loading that WordPress and getting the white screen of death and you don't know what's happening. Well, these tools here can actually help you backtrace that and figure out exactly where that error is coming from. Once you've found a bug, then you can create a new ticket on track. There's a link there, coretrackwordpress.org slash new ticket and then you add in all the details that you've found from the debug script and describe the issue and then submit that and you can have to pick up yourself or just let one of the developers handle that. So as well as reporting bugs, bug gardening is a very important thing to do. So every time someone reports a bug, people don't just go ahead and download that and then jump into it and try and fix it. You need to actually make sure it is a bug first. You don't want people wasting their time and effort trying to look at something where it isn't actually a bug at all and that's called bug gardening. So that's something you can do to help out. You can have a look at existing bugs, existing track tickets, new track tickets that are open, download it and just try and follow the steps of the users and just try and identify to make sure whether that is an actual bug or not and that's really helpful to pass that on to the next stage of the workflow for that. So it's part of bug reporting, but separate is security issues. If you think you've found a security issue with WordPress, please try and report it ethically. And so don't just go, don't just write a blog post and say, oh, I found this bug and here's how it exploits things and you'll be careful and update. Give a thought to reporting it ethically. There's a couple of places you can do that. One is called hacker one. So if you're on the normal WordPress.org hosted, go to hacker one slash WordPress and you can report the security vulnerability there and then those guys can then take that through the momentum securely for that. If you find a bug on WordPress.com or the app, the mobile app, then you can report on hacker one slash automatic and that'll go through the motion for those particular things there. But if you do find a bug and you do report it, which is great, please give a reasonable time to get it fixed and patched before you then write about the vulnerability. We don't want people being exploited. So just give a little bit of thought to that if you are reporting security stuff. Thank you. Hands up here who speaks a second language? Anyone? Couple of people there. Well, great. I gave you 14, seemed to be a big year for stuff. In the state of the word, Matt said that non-English WordPress downloads surpassed the English ones for the first time there. So there's more people using WordPress in non-English than there are the English. So there's definitely a need there for translation. And so the term translation is a polyglot. I can't quite remember how that came about, but that's what they call polyglots. So there's lots of things you can do with WordPress and translation. If you do speak a second language, you can translate WordPress core files, like the dot-pot files, the translation files. You can translate plugins as well. Themes, the codex, which is the API that developers use. It tells you all the functions and things. Any documentation, pretty much everything. So anything that's WordPress, if you speak a second language, you can jump in at some point and translate that. And that'd be a fantastic benefit for the community. Talking about community, here's some stats that I pulled a couple of days ago from the W3tex website. So they monitor all the websites out there in the interwebs. 50, well almost 60% of the websites that they can identify that has a content management system is WordPress. So that's huge out there. And overall, the entire web, we're almost up to 33% of all websites are running WordPress, which is huge. So there's millions and millions of users. How you can support users? Well, there's lots of different ways. On WordPress.org, so the main one, they have the support forums. So a lot of you will probably jump in there at some point to go, and there's lots of different areas that you can report on and themes and plugins. So there's different areas of the forums. Just look through them. If there's something there that you can help, you might be pointing someone in the right direction or you might actually know a fix. You might have been, had that issue before. Then yeah, jump in and reply and try and help people. It's a great place to start to get to know WordPress and get to know all the features and functions and the people as well. So please do jump in to support forums when you can. There's Slack as well. I've also got a lot of Slack links in this slide, but there's a huge community on wordpress.slack.com. A lot of channels and a lot of people asking a lot, a lot of stuff. You can certainly jump into a couple of relevant channels for you. And then just answer some questions to help people in there. But aside from actually the official WordPress, there are different communities like LinkedIn. If you're a business person, you probably use LinkedIn quite a bit. But there are a few good WordPress groups on there. I'm a member of the WordPress developers. There's a WordPress experts one and there's just a general WordPress one as well, which are quite popular. And they do a lot of posting in there. And it's mostly from a more business point of view. But if you're looking to build a more business relationship with clients, that could be a good place for you to have a look at the forums and answering questions and build up your trust and authority with that particular community. Outside LinkedIn, if you're a more social person, there's the Facebook groups as well. So the ones I'm in is Advanced WordPress. There's one called WordPress Australia. There's one for Genesis, if you're a Genesis developer. And in fact, there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of more of those. But yeah, so if Facebook is more, you're a go-to social place, then you can certainly jump in there and help support some users there. Something else to help support users, aside from just support forums. WordPress has training. It's on the makewordpress.org slide slash training. There's slides and presentations and things that they can help people with, help businesses and help different niche areas. If that's something in your skill set, if you like doing presentations, if you like doing videos, then certainly you can jump on there and talk to the team and see how you can contribute back that way. There's WordPress TV. So today, we've got some videos going. These videos will end up on WordPress TV at some point. And it's not just as simple as uploading a video. There's lots of things that need to be done when you're doing video editing. So that's your particular area of expertise if you've got some expertise in videos. Have a look at the team there. Some of the videos need editing, like chopped off or lower res. Some are missing lower thirds that people would like to put on but don't know how. So if you know how to do that, you can help out. Of course, the finished product needs to be uploaded to WordPress TV. So even in that way, if you've got some video skills you could help out quite easily. Their Slack channel is slash forums. Okay. Documentation. So we skipped on that in testing, but documentation is huge in WordPress. If you're all seasons WordPress users, that's great. You probably know your way around WordPress, but can you just imagine if you were installing that for the first time and didn't know how to install a plugin or where to get themes or how to bring up the editor, how to make things bold or all that sort of stuff. Well, documentation needs to be kept update all the time. So there's lots of areas for documentation. One of the biggest one is the contributor handbook. We're talking about contributing back to WordPress today. So the handbook is the biggest place that it tells you all these different areas to contribute to. So that in itself needs to be kept up to date to make sure that when people want to contribute, they're contributing in the right stuff in the right place. Then there's all the different versions of WordPress. When WordPress doesn't update, it could be a minor or a major. All the inline documentation needs to be updated for that. There's nothing worse than trying to get some documentation and find some version that's got a different feature somewhere else. So every time WordPress updates, you need to make sure that the documentation inline is up to date and current. So there's all the developer stuff as well, all the functions, the APIs, if you're a developer, you might not want to develop a plugin or contribute to core, but if you're using WordPress development and you come across something in the development documentation that's wrong or missing, then you can edit it and just change it. And again, that's contributing back to the WordPress community. It's helping other people. Public speaking, why not give it a go? So at local WordPress meetups, they're always looking for speakers, we're always looking for speakers and at national work camps as well. It doesn't really require any previous speaking skills, just get up and do it. In fact, we get really, really excited when new people want to speak. We really encourage new people to get up there and speak about it. And I've had some people that say to me in the past, people won't be interested in what I have to say. And yes, we do, we love to hear from new people. We are interested in what you say. And you don't need to talk about something huge. You can talk about a project, a theme you've been working on, a cool little feature that you've found. Gutenberg's the next thing, so a cool feature with Gutenberg, just anything at all. And you don't have to talk for 40 minutes. You can talk for 10 minutes, five minutes, or just as long as you feel comfortable for it. But I'd really encourage you guys to get up there and you'll give a talk, a little speech, something about WordPress, it really does help. And the local guide, local meetups really, really do appreciate that. Volunteering, Ricky mentioned it at the start. All these meetups, all the WordPress meetups, all the WordCamps, everything's run by volunteers, all the guys in the red shirts. So you might want to contribute that way. We know that your time is precious and when you want to volunteer, we really, really, really appreciate that. You have no idea how much we do appreciate people volunteering for the meetups and the WordCamps. So there's lots of things that you can do, lots of things you can help out with. If it's a local meetup, you can help out with updating the schedule on meetup.com. On the actual night, you can help with setting up the tables and chairs, putting it, packing up and setting up. There's meeting and greeting. That's quite good when people are new to the meetups. They might be a little bit nervous, a little bit hesitant. There's nothing other than a nice handshake and a smile at the door to welcome people in. And there's other things like graphic designs for the events, sponsor wrangling and marketing, if you want to do a little bit more for that. And when you do volunteer, though, it's really, really good because you end up with front row seats, which is great, and usually a free ticket as well. So you can't beat that. And of course, you get to learn new skills. So if you're volunteering at something like WordCamp, maybe you want to get involved in AV, in audio video that you haven't done before. So you can get a little bit of a new skill set as well. So they're really good advantages to volunteering. So if there isn't a local meetup, why not create one? Or even if there is a local meetup, you can get really, really specific, create one for your suburb, which is great. So you absolutely, definitely create a local meetup if you can. There's definitely going to be people wanting to come along. So this is the last bit of the talk, I was just basically talking through how to create a local meetup, because I get a lot of people asking me, asking me this, oh, does it take a lot of organization, and not really, using the plan. So if you're looking to create a local meetup, I would really strongly advise you use meetup.com to start with. There's good tools on there, there's good community, there's lots of people that can find your meetup and come along. So definitely try and use meetup.com if you're a first-timer. Of course, if you're trying to open a new meetup, you're going to need a venue. That's going to be really, really important. So you need to do a venue search. And with a venue search, you need to bear in mind the type of format that you're looking for. I know it's the last one that slide there, but if you're looking to do a meetup, there's just a coffee and a chat, then obviously looking for restaurants or cafes, or if you're looking for something to do a little bit more formal, like this sort of thing, then you're going to have to look for venues that have got AV equipment and things like that. So just bear in mind the type of format you're looking for when you're creating a meetup as regards to venue. There are going to be some costs involved. If you're running on meetup.com, there's organizer fees, and they're $14.99 a month, and that's about 21 Australian dollars a month, just to run that on meetup. There's costs for venue as well, maybe. I'll touch on that a little bit later. But definitely there's going to be time and commitment. So if you are wanting to run a local meetup group, then please ensure that you can put some time and commitment to make that thing run and just make it run smoothly. Try not doing it solo, it's a big mistake. Really I've tried running a couple of meetups solo and it sucks the life out of you. So try and have at least one or two people in the background that can help, even for things like if you go away on holiday, someone to run it. And so definitely have a look at getting a good team of people there. And of course, topics. You need to make sure that you've got a list of topics there. Don't just like create a meetup and say, yeah, come along and then, oh, actually I don't know what I'm talking about. So a little bit of planning is good. Maybe build like a six months worth of topics or something like that. If you have started a meetup group very recently, you're not already part of the WordPress Meetup chapter, then it's something you might want to consider joining. So as of early this year, there's 617 official meetup groups across the whole planet that are part of the WordPress Meetup chapter. You need to have at least one event per month to be able to go into the chapter program. And you need to abide by something called five good faith rules. And there's a link there to them. And it's basically been inclusive, welcoming, and giving everyone a fair go basically. What happens is you do step down as an organizer, and then automatic, and the meetup chapters step up as the organizer. The benefits of that is they pay the fees, which is good. And they give you support as well. They can give you, if you really struggle with the venue costs, they can subsidize or help with venue fees as well. There is a few things you need to commit at least three months in advance to that. So you have to have like three months worth of meetups in there before they can help you out. And of course you access to things like swag and help as well on Slack. There's a couple of Slack channels there, the community events and the community team as well. So definitely if there's a local meetup there, that's good, but if there's not, definitely think about creating one. It's not as challenging as you may think. And in fact, I have just in the last couple of days banged out a document, and it's free for you to download. There's no email or anything. So if you go on to that link there. So zeropointdevelopment.com slash WCBNE18, and password is contributor. And there's a word document there. And it goes through all the things you need to do to set up a meetup in more detail than these two slides here. We talk about scheduling, we talk about costs, we look at different types of venues. And I've even got like maybe 20 lists of topics there that you can use for the first few months. Definitely download that and have a look at that and take that away as a freebie. Those are the images that I used and that's me. That's all done. Play with time to spare.