Welcome to the Core Contributor Handbook, the place to learn how to get involved with the WordPress core development community, and start contributing to WordPress core.
Whether you are a beta 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 workflow process, and more. There are also guides to help you set up the tools you’ll need to start contributing to WordPress core.
Contribute with Testing
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-free as possible.
You don’t need to know how to code or create a patch, 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 nightly version released.
Found a security vulnerability? WordPress believes in responsible and private disclosure. Report it directly to our security team.
Contribute with Code
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.
Best Practices
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.
Tutorials & Guides
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.
Need help?
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. 😊
Note: If you’re interested in improving this handbook, leave a message in #docs or ping @samuelsidler (sam on Slack).
