Contributor Handbooks Are Upon Us: Help Us!

It’s all hands on deck for the Documentation team at WordPress! On Tuesday, the WordPress documentation team met to discuss the brand new creation of contributor handbooks. The Contributor Handbooks are being put together by the Make Documentation team, spearheaded by Siobhan McKeown and with the help of the WordPress community, myself included.

The general purpose of the handbooks is this. To provide step by step guides for users who want to get involved in developing and contributing to WordPress, no matter how they choose to do so.

Each handbook will cover a specific area of WordPress contribution and walk users through the contribution process and provide tips, best practices, security concerns and more. The various groups are:

• Mobile
• Support
• Core
• Docs
• Polygots
• Events
• Theme Review
• Theme Development
• Plugin Development
• UX/UI
• Accessibility

If these categories seem familiar, that’s because this is basically how the WordPress Make contributor community breaks down, with a few extras. Most of these individual groups will be handling creating content for the varioius handbooks, and some have already gotten started, like the Mobile and Core teams.

Writing and editing will continue through May 31st for most handbooks, but Theme and Plugin Development will take a few months longer then that. Editors are assigned to most teams already to help guide content contributors along.

Personally, I will be working on the Theme Development handbook led by Rachel Baker, but I encourage you to get involved in any way you can. Right now, all the teams are working towards putting together a table of contents until the end of January.

If you want to lend a helping hand, head on over to the Make Documentation group and jump on in. Or you can message me @jaydhoffmann or Siobhan, @SiobhanPMcKeown on Twitter and we’ll be happy to point you in the right direction.

And remember, suggestions are great, but solid contributions are way better so please stop on by and lend your support. After all WordPress is a community effort. From the words of Siobhan,

I’d love it for the handbooks to be written as a collaboration between the support/docs team and the various contributor groups. That means corralling people from across the community to get involved. There’s already a lot of content that we can work with, and we can create more.

Let’s do it people!