How to get started with committing to WordPress Core

Nathan Monk
Hello, and welcome to this bonus episode, this bonus interview. And today I am joined by one of the SMILE developers, Matt Oakley. Hey, Matt.

Matt Oakley
Hiya Nath, you okay?

Nathan Monk
Yeah not too bad. Thank you. How are you?

Matt Oakley
Yeah, good thank you.

Nathan Monk
So Matt, the reason for this kind of bonus interview that we’re doing today is in 2021, you made your first commit to WordPress Core. So this interview is definitely one of the nerdier interviews that we’ll have on our channel, I guess. But I really wanted to speak to you about that, because I think that’s quite a big thing, really, in the scheme of things. And I just wanted to ask you a few questions about your experience with WordPress, and in particular, committing to core if that’s okay? Well, shall we start then? Could you tell me a little bit about your relationship with WordPress?

Matt Oakley
Yeah, so I’m a back end developer at SMILE. I use WordPress every day and I focus on extending core functionality to themes, integrating themes with third party services and building new plugins to simplify WordPress workflows.

Nathan Monk
Cool. And so as part of that work, then what would you say that is the most commonly misunderstood thing about WordPress?

Matt Oakley
That it’s an out of the box tool for non-technical people to use for cutting corners. WordPress is actually extremely extendable. And as a framework for developers, it offers a consistent experience that then travels all the way through to the user experience.

Nathan Monk
Okay, that’s interesting. And what’s one of your, what’s one of your favourite use cases, then, for WordPress?

Matt Oakley
Be able to rapidly build content solutions, while again, providing a consistent experience for the user. So you can rapidly build multiple different websites for multiple different use cases. Yet every user at the end of the day has a very similar editing experience.

Nathan Monk
So would you say then the one of the biggest advantages of WordPress is the speed and pace that you can set things up then?

Matt Oakley
Yeah, definitely. Because at the end of the day, every user has a different use case. And there’s never one website, that’s the same as another developer. WordPress makes it very easy to just tweak those use cases. So you’re not having to start from scratch every time.

Nathan Monk
And you talked about the kind of extendibility of WordPress and so if every use case is different, then are you able to customise that backend experience?

Matt Oakley
Yeah, absolutely. And the powerful thing about WordPress, though, is that while you customise the backend experience, the user’s experience is very consistent. So if they went over to another WordPress instance, yes, there may be some differences in the way that we’ve changed the back end. However, their experience is going to be very largely the same and then not bounce from custom content solution to custom content solution.

Nathan Monk
Yeah, yeah. So there’s a lot of internal language about WordPress, I think sometimes and one of the terms that we throw around is WordPress Core. What is WordPress Core?

Matt Oakley
So WordPress Core is basically the main source of WordPress. So it’s the main code base that every WordPress instance is based on, and it is open source so it is maintained by developers all around the world voluntarily. And they work together to produce new updates and new features to the main source code.

Nathan Monk
And so what does it mean then to commit to Core?

Matt Oakley
Essentially, you are contributing and changing or fixing the main WordPress instance. So places like wordpress.com. And everybody really every one of the big builders will all use that same framework. So you are contributing to, you know, the core of WordPress.

Nathan Monk
Great. So it’s about you kind of improving WordPress and that that that is done by people like you essentially.

Matt Oakley
Essentially, yeah.

Nathan Monk
And this, I guess, that talks about, you know, that leads on to things like open source and open source being that anybody can contribute their upgrades. Is that right?

Matt Oakley
Yes, absolutely.

Nathan Monk
Okay, cool. So in 2021 then you did your first commit into WordPress, right? I’d love you to tell us a little bit more about that process, if that’s okay?

Matt Oakley
Yeah, so it started mainly, it’s just an interest of, basically, well, I work with WordPress every day, I have my workflows and my way of doing things. And I just kind of wanted to know, how to Core do it? These are the people that built this thing? How do they work? What are their methodologies? And I want you to take learnings from that, and try and build that into our own work. Because if, you know, theoretically, if you’re building the same way, as the people are building the platform are building it, then in theory, the work should should be better and more consistent.

So yeah, I just cloned the the development repo. So I cloned I think, five, not 5.9. And I start, I didn’t start making any specific commits any specific tickets, I just started playing around, what can I edit? What can I change? How’s it structured. And then I looked in the good first bugs board found a nice, nice, simple bug raised a patch for it and got it got someone to review it and got accepted.

Nathan Monk
So you say, got someone to review it. So just somebody kind of that controls WordPress reviews your work, essentially, that’s what we’re saying?

Matt Oakley
Yeah. So there are some very handy people out there called committers. And they basically manage what goes into the source control. You can either just leave a note on the ticket @ mentioning a committer. And just saying “Hey, do you mind looking at this. But I went to their Slack channel. So WordPress has got their own Slack channel, for committing to Core. So I just went in there and I said, Hey, there’s somebody’s mind. Looking at my first patch. I’ve never done this before, point me in the right direction if I’ve not done anything, right, and a couple people had feedback over things I’d miss, you know, documentation, that kind of stuff. But did that within 10 minutes. And next thing, you know, they were like, Yeah, cool. It’ll be in the next release.

Nathan Monk
No way, I mean, that sounds like quite an almost kind of a casual approach to it really don’t you know, it’s it doesn’t sound that scary. Did you find it intimidating, to begin with?

Matt Oakley
I think I did in the Slack channel. I think developers everywhere always have a fear of other developers looking at their work. So yeah, it definitely was. But everybody there’s really friendly. And, you know, it’s not like we’re getting paid. I wasn’t paid to do this. I did it one evening in my own time. So I understood that if it wasn’t accepted, that’s fine. But equally, people aren’t going to be mean to you if you’re trying to help them. I don’t think

Nathan Monk
That’s true, hopefully at least, right. And I think one of the things historically with WordPress, this is truly nerdy now, but WordPress is stored in SVN. But recently, there’s been like a wider shift over to Git and I believe that all of your work was done exclusively through Git, is that right?

Matt Oakley
Yes, so their documentation, I read it as you need to raise it as an SVN which is incorrect, you don’t. So I did raise it as an initial SVN patch, which was interesting. Git being the kind of industry de facto source control management. SVN is very different. It’s handled more as a file system. But I did raise an SVN patch, and then a pull request. But yeah, Git. GitHub is the way forward. It was way, way simpler,

Nathan Monk
Really? So and it was, because obviously, we use Git all the time at SMILE and did it just feel like the kind of modern workflow that you were used to?

Matt Oakley
Yeah, absolutely. You know, that the SVN was me, had to create an SVN patch file, then upload the file to the ticket, and then someone had to download that file, apply it to their plight to their repo and test it. Whereas Git, it’s just you just check out that branch, don’t you? And just add a note.

Nathan Monk
Well, so before we wrap up than Matt, are there any top tips or a top tip that you would say to anybody that’s interested in doing their first commit?

Matt Oakley
Yeah. Don’t get bogged down in the detail. Just set up an instance and just poke around. Have some fun, it’s all local. So there’s no pressure, change some things, delete some things, see what happens. Understand how they’ve structured things. Don’t go in there thinking I’m going to solve the next major Gutenberg release all on my own with this ticket. Because that’s totally unfeasible. So just, you don’t even have to solve an initial ticket.

Just get in there and have a play around, see how things are done. And then go on there. Find a ticket that you think you could solve and then solve it. And equally, if you don’t see anything, ask in the Slack channel. And the Slack channels also full of full of projects upcoming. So you can always follow the new projects and get involved that isn’t directly related to WordPress Core.

Nathan Monk
Nice. Nice. Yeah. Thanks, Matt. So which version of WordPress does your first commit go out in? 5.9, okay, cool. And you get a little name check, don’t you in the readme or the changelog or whatever.

Matt Oakley
I believe I’ve already had one as well in an email, weekly email that went out about things that got merged into five now nice. My name appeared on that one as well. I think.

Nathan Monk
Nice one. Well, congratulations, I think it’s really good that you’re contributing back to Core. So thanks very much for your time today, Matt.

Matt Oakley
No worries.

Nathan Monk
Okay, well, that just about wraps up this interview for today. Like I said, a little bit nerdy today. But if you are a developer, and you are interested in committing to WordPress core, it’s not as hard as you think. Definitely, like Matt says, Just get a local instance. Give it a go. Don’t take it too seriously. And yeah, for now. Have a great day. See you soon