Documentation Contributor Handbook

This handbook contains information about how to contribute to WordPress documentation and be a member of the Documentation team.

Who is in the Documentation team?

Documentation team consists of volunteers and a few sponsored contributors with various backgrounds, levels of knowledge and experience working with WordPress. The team is maintaining both: end user and developer documentation, which creates tasks for both: end users and developers, as well as technical writers. Get to know the team members at our team’s page.

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Prior knowledge

The Documentation team is one of rare WordPress Make teams that can benefit a lot from contributors without any prior knowledge or experience with WordPress. This valuable skill can give us insight how well documentation is written for people who are just starting to use WordPress.

Having a lot of development experience with WordPress is a skill needed to make sure all code examples in documentation are following WordPress Coding Standards and best practices.

Any skills, knowledge and experience level in between these two examples from above are welcomed and very valuable to creating and improving WordPress documentation.

To get a better idea of all the ways you can contribute to WordPress documentation, take a look at our team roles page.

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What is needed?

In order to contribute to the Documentation team you’ll need the following:

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Where is the stuff?

  1. Documentation
  2. Team collaboration
    • Blog – for meeting agendas and summaries (and anything related to Docs team).
    • Slack channel #docs – where meetings are happening (and all communication regarding the team itself).
    • GitHub repository – where issues for all documentation are reported, discussed and worked on.
  3. Meetings (alternating every week) on Tuesdays at 2PM UTC:
    • Regular meeting with agenda and summary published on our blog.
    • Issues triage where we discuss issues from the GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ repository.
    • The next meeting is on Tuesday, 14:00 UTC.

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Getting started

We have recorded several onboarding sessions to introduce you to various parts of WordPress documentation and help you get started with the team. These sessions are, more or less, high level overview which should answer the most common questions new contributors usually have. We do not, by any means, assume you will be completely ready to start contributing after just watching these sessions. Feel free to ask any questions you have after watching sessions (and you will most likely have them) in our Slack channel.

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Reporting documentation issues

Any issue found in WordPress documentation should be reported in our GitHub repository. Please note that this repository does not hold any documentation whatsoever. It is used only to report, discuss and work on WordPress documentation issues. Here you can request new page in documentation or an update for the existing one.

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Guides

  • Official documentation Style guide – All new documentation should follow these guidelines. It is also planned that all existing documentation be updated to meet them.

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Resources


Note: What about the Codex?

The Codex is a community-created repository for WordPress documentation. Anyone can edit any of the information on the Codex, and only a WordPress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ user account is required to create a page.

At this moment in time, the Codex is not actively maintained and pages are being migrated to both HelpHub and DevHub.

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