Contributing to Upstream WordPress

While reviewing the Site Reset Local Addon, I found that there were issues in the WPCLI db-command. I feel like I have a general idea of what needs fixing, but navigating the path towards upstream contribution can be overwhelming.

So after bringing it up with my manager, I have the green light to take some time during the week to help out upstream!

Since getting started and finding out where one’s aid can be most beneficial can be challenging, let’s document this process and see where it leads us.

Because my initial inkling is to help out with the db-command, I’ll start by becoming more familiar with the recent messages in the #cli channel in the WP Slack instance.

The first thing I see is that there are weekly office hours on Wednesdays at 15:00 UTC, (or 7:00 am in PDX) in WordPress #cli slack.

WPCLI Contributing Handbook

After reviewing the posts in slack for the last ~3months, I discovered that there is a dedicated contribution page within the WP-CLI handbook:

WPCLI 2021 Roadmap

From one of the weekly office hours, there’s a general roadmap from the maintainer, schlessera.

My goals for 2021:

  1. Migrate Behat from v2 to v3 (needs lots of changes in the test syntax)
  2. Finish new scaffolding engine and introduce the concept of canonical code generation for WordPress (think artisan make:*)
  3. Drastically improve documentation

Most of this was already on the agenda for 2020, but (as @jrf as eloquently put it in her post at https://24daysindecember.net/2020/12/21/a-perfect-storm/), this year has been a perfect storm of compatibility issues.

Hopefully, 2021 will be a bit more cooperative…

To cultivate contributions towards those goals, I work on:

  1. Reducing friction for contributions
  2. Talking about the goals and their purpose
  3. (Going to contributor days to inspire and get people interested) <– maybe this will be possible again in 2021?

WordPress #cli Slack channel

Documentation, I can help with that!

Additional notes from reading slack

Reading through the posts in slack also gave some good links out to various challenges in the larger PHP community.

PHP 8

Migration from Travis CI to Github Actions

Looks like Travis CI changed a things which prevented WP cli from doing automated testing and as a result delayed the release of wp-cli 2.5.0.

Most things appear to have been migrated to Github Actions and there’s just a few remaining pieces before the latest version of WPCLI can be released!


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