To make the highest impact on WordPress, Five for the Future organizations and contributors are encouraged to work on projects that align with WordPress’ goals. As you consider your contributions, please consider the following current big themes and high impact projects. Thank you for contributing!
Growing WordPress
New WordPress installations are stagnant year over year. Now is the time to encourage the use of open-source software solutions like WordPress and show the power of the open web. We should work to ensure that our project supports businesses and commerce by providing access and opportunities to those who might not have them otherwise.
Evolving our Event Series
Our event series must move beyond a “one size fits all” strategy. By offering more advanced topics and focused events, we can meet our community’s needs. With time being valuable, our events should clearly help participants reach their goals.
Furthering focus areas
The following summarize our high level goals across the various parts of the WordPress project.
CMS:
Test, iterate, and ship Phase 3 of the Gutenberg project (core-team)
Community:
Continue to support the community through learning, events, and mentorship of current and future contributors
Ecosystem:
Address the difficulty in moving platforms through the Data Liberation project as well as streamline existing review processes across repositories.
Explore the many paths to contributing
Code is just one of many ways to contribute to the project. If you already know what type of contribution you’d like to make, you can check out this list of teams (with links to their community sites) and team reps. If you’re not yet sure, here are a few teams and the areas they fall into:
- Development, Technology, Code: Core/Editor, Mobile, CLI/Tide, Security, Performance
- Design, Product, UX/UI: Design, Accessibility, Test, Triage
- Community, Extending WP, Education: Community, Themes, Plugins, Polyglots, Training
- Contributor Experience: Meta, Docs, Hosting, Privacy
- Communications: Marketing, Support, WPTV
High impact projects
To better surface impactful projects, the following breaks the work down by team and by initiative, like Data Liberation. To learn more about how to get more deeply involved, you can head here to see more details across all the teams.
The Make/Community team works on supporting and empowering WordPress events all over the world.
The following are high impact areas:
- Host and support WordPress events (WordCamps, Meetups, and everything in between) all over the world.
- Reactivate WordPress Meetups everywhere, especially in major WordPress cities.
- Help shape the future of WordPress events!
The Make/Core team makes WordPress. Please review the Core Handbook and Block Editor Contributor Guide to learn how you can contribute to Core, including any Gutenberg related projects.
The following are a few specific Overview issues as a sampling of the broader work that needs contributions:
- Phase 3: Collaboration index.
- Gutenberg as a framework.
- Design Editor Overview.
- Writing Overview.
- Navigation tracking issue.
- Streamline editing and configuring homepage.
- Become a REST API maintainer.
View Iteration issues to see work slated for each upcoming WordPress release.
The Make/Design team improves the design and UX of WordPress by working alongside the developer teams on specific features. Most active design work happens in the block editor project.
Explore the Needs design or Needs design feedback. To follow their latest efforts, review their biweekly Design Share updates to see what’s in progress and how you can get involved.
The Data Liberation project envisions an open web where users can effortlessly switch between platforms, eliminating the concept of being locked into a system. It cuts across many teams.
The following are the most high impact areas to contribute to:
- Work on Community Tools to ship enhancements or fixes to make them even more robust. Here’s a nice list of Community Tools to get started.
- Submit a New Tool that aligns with our project’s objectives. Read more about what we’re looking for.
The Make/Docs team is responsible for creating documentation and is always on the look-out for writers.
The following are high impact areas:
Check out the open issues in the Team’s GitHub repository for more.
The Make/Playground team works on WordPress Playground: the platform that lets you run WordPress instantly on any device without a host, most often in a browser.
Review the following contribution guide to get started. Contributions are welcomed from code to bug reports to ideas for evolving the tool.
The Make Themes team focuses on a wide range of work including reviewing themes, creating the yearly default theme, and helping folks switch to block themes.
The following are high impact areas related to the adoption of block themes:
- Block Themes Tracking issue.
- Consider exposing the Font Library for classic themes.
- Block Themes and site editor: Refactoring templates.
- Advance the Create Block Theme plugin that helps streamline block theme creation.
The Make/Training team helps people learn to use, extend, and contribute to WordPress through Learn WordPress.
The following are high impact areas:
- Help create content for Learn WordPress.
- Contribute to the Team’s Focus areas.
- Help contribute to Learning Pathways
Get help finding your contribution path
If you are still finding yourself struggling to find the best way forward or don’t see your skills reflected in the above, we’d love the chance to fix that. Here are two ways:
- Check out our contributor wizard and find how to get started. This is more about finding a team rather than a specific high impact project.
- Head to #five-for-the-future, a dedicated slack channel in the Making WordPress slack, and introduce yourself including information about how you’d like to contribute. If you don’t yet have a Making WordPress slack account, you can sign up to create one here.
We’re excited to contribute alongside you.