Inspired by Amy Hendrix‘ post on her first patch to an Open Source project, I want to briefly outline my first steps on WordPress Core trac:

My first patch to WordPress was basically just turning the recommendation that was given in-ticket into a patch. This was in June 2011 and is still waiting for further attention. But to be honest, at that time it wasn’t necessarily as much about the content of the patch for me as it was about creating a usable SVN patch in the first place. And actually submitting it. So it seemed like the perfect opportunity, since the content was pretty much outlined already.

My first WordPress props didn’t come until almost one year later. My most popular Plugin is about selecting a custom header image for each individual post type or taxonomy, so I pay close attention to all changes around custom headers, to keep the Plugin up to date. After the changes that made it possible to select images in the media library as a header, I read through the code to learn all about it, when I noticed a missing underscore in a translation function. After some checking on Core trac, I opened a bug report and attached my patch. Sergey Biryukov noticed that it was also missing on the custom background side and updated the patch with that change. Later that day, Ryan Boren comitted the change.

My first contribution: _

This was three months ago. Since then many more patches followed. Mainly because I became part of the Twenty Twelve team for WordPress 3.5 with Lance Willett and Drew Strojny, which is a blast for me, to say the least. I can’t believe how much I learn and how much fun it is to work together with them.

I wrote another retrospective post on my WordPress involvement, following my invitation to the WordPress Community Summit