If you talk to someone deep in the WordPress project, you’ll often hear the refrain of:
“Pull requests welcome!” “Open an issue!”
Not all contribution pathways are the same though and something I am trying to be more aware of these days is sharing more nuance around what contribution in a certain area might be like. While I can’t predict what a contribution experience will be, I can set expectations, offer help for high priority work, and keep the right things moving.
I’d be remiss not to link to a guide I wrote nearly four years ago now talking about navigating the community, including various situationals for how to get help. Perhaps this post is a sign I should loop back and update it (dare I say pull requests welcome?).
Entering no man’s person’s land
You’re on your own on this pathway. You open a PR and find yourself scrounging for reviews. There’s both freedom to explore/experiment and a very real feeling of pushing a boulder uphill by yourself. This can be a super meaningful way to get involved by owning an area and moving it forward iteratively, often with little drama and sometimes little feedback. In some cases, you might end up fully blocked because you don’t have the ability to commit PRs and you’re waiting for reviews.
Walking into a battle (by accident)
Enjoy this horrifying gemini AI generated image.
You open an issue or PR and step into contribution only to immediately be met with resistance and strong opinions, sometimes complete with social media posts about your efforts. Maybe you missed the historical significance or someone suggested the idea three years ago but was dismissed. Either way, you started out excited to contribute and are left confused about how to proceed, wading through comments and conflicting directions. At the same time, perhaps you’re onto something?
Trying to keep up
A new project in Core catches your attention as being beneficial to your product or to a problem you regularly see people run into. You decide to dig in and offer up a PR or a design the following week. By the time you do so, the feature has already substantially progressed and what you shared is quickly bordering on being out of date. You can’t fully dedicate yourself to the feature but you still want to try to contribute. You end up spending more time reading PRs and issues in order to figure out how to get better into the flow of the work. Sometimes this means you finally find a way to keep up and other times you find yourself lost to the sea of issues/PRs.
Smooth sailing
Last but not least (I nearly forgot this pathway), you want to contribute with a new feature or to add onto a current one. It happens to align with current priorities for a release, leading to baked in momentum with reviews and support, and you’re able to ship something in a timely manner that lands without much drama and with some fanfare.
My aim is to understand better ahead of time what a pathway is likely to be like when someone expresses wanting to contribute. In some cases, we’ll never know. In some cases, it might be no person's land until suddenly it becomes a walking into battle situation upon trying to merge. When working with folks around contribution though, it’s a framework I have in mind to set expectations and, when needed, provide more formalized support. There are also moments where those of us in the WordPress project need to pick our head up to recognize contribution in the form of feedback is needed and we need to do the work to bring people with us, especially in fast moving, high priority areas. There are also times when we need to better communicate areas that folks can dive into that avoid both the walking into battle and no person's land vibe, like the Polish board.
Complicating factors
Tied into all of this is the timing that you try to contribute and how much it does or doesn’t overlap with a major WordPress release cycle where there are very clear rhythms around how much time folks have to offer reviews, open experimental PRs, and pay attention outside of top priorities.
Outside of timing, there’s the very real reality that what’s not a priority for our work in Core could be a priority for the person contributing. There’s natural tension here to be aware of and I know all of us contributing to the project both want folks to have a positive experience and can’t do everything.
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