Whether you are a beta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. tester, casual contributor, or serious contributor, this handbook will provide the information you need to get started.
Here you can learn about how the WordPress project is organized, communication channels, best practices, the Trac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. workflow process, and more. There are also guides to help you set up the tools you’ll need to start contributing to WordPress core.
Testing is a very important part of the release cycle. You can install the latest development version locally to test new features, and how the changes work with your site setup (theme/plugins/etc.). You can start testing as soon as a new development version is available (alpha), and continue throughout the release cycle to ensure the next version of WordPress is as bug A bug is an error or unexpected result. Performance improvements, code optimization, and are considered enhancements, not defects. After feature freeze, only bugs are dealt with, with regressions (adverse changes from the previous version) being the highest priority.-free as possible.
You don’t need to know how to code or create a patch A special text file that describes changes to code, by identifying the files and lines which are added, removed, and altered. It may also be referred to as a diff. A patch can be applied to a codebase for testing., just provide a well-written bug report, with details of the issue and steps to reproduce. You can confirm the issue is fixed once a patch is committed and a new bleeding edge The latest revision of the software, generally in development and often unstable. Also known as trunk. nightly version released.
Found a security vulnerability? WordPress believes in responsible and private disclosure. Report it directly to our security team.
Whether you need to report one bug and provide a patch to fix it, or wish to become involved in maintaining one or more WordPress components, contributing code is a great way to improve WordPress. This section walks through the WordPress codebase and how it’s laid out, then teaches you more about the code repository and our bug tracker (Trac).
Design decisions made within WordPress are often a consideration when contributing code and are outlined in this section as well. Finally, if you’re interested in fixing bugs, our walkthrough is made to get you quickly started.
Over time, the WordPress community has developed some best practices, which keep the code base consistent and understandable by the community.
In the best practices section, we outline the coding standards for CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and PHP. Additionally, inline documentation standards for both JavaScript and PHP are documented in-depth.
Finally, the section walks through the Core APIs and the best practices to follow when writing patches.
Completely new to WordPress development? In this section, we include a number of tutorials and guides to help get you setup. Whether you want to setup WordPress for local development, install a local server, install a version control system (VCS), understand how to work with patches, or better understand how to work with Trac, we have you covered.
We all start somewhere. If you’re having trouble getting involved with contributing to WordPress core, come find us on Slack in #core. We don’t bite. 😊