Patrick's Programming Blog

Giving Back to The Community

presents
  1. Blogging for Benjamin Competition
  2. Why I'm Grateful to Work on the Web
  3. 24 Pull Requests
  4. Update Downloadable Product's Expiration Date in WooCommere
  5. Get Lost in the Flow and Work for More Than a Salary
  6. Why A Plugin's Popularity Matters
  7. Why You Should (Or Shouldn't) Use Premium Plugins
  8. WooCommerce Terms & Conditions
  9. Only Ship to Continental United States with WooCommerce
  10. Just Talk
  11. Why I Love Jetpack
  12. Making Jetpack Better
  13. Remove Billing Address for Free Virtual Orders in WooCommerce
  14. Notify Admin of Customer Address Change in WooCommerce
  15. Open Your Self Up To New Possibilities
  16. 2013 Resolutions Review
  17. Create a Community
  18. Tips for Starting a Community
  19. The Intent of Goals
  20. Create The Ultimate Invoicing System Using WooCommerce
  21. Change From Address in Ninja Forms
  22. Work With People Who Inspire You
  23. Contact Form 7 & MailPoet Integration
  24. Monotasking
  25. Giving Back to The Community
  26. Adding Fuctionality to Lean Plugins
  27. Choose Stripe For a Payment Gateway
  28. A Dip Into Entrepreneurship
  29. Reward Yourself
  30. Blogging for Benjamin Plugin
  31. Blogging for Benjamin Wrap Up

It's Christmas here in the United States and just about everyone will be giving and receiving gifts today. When you're a kid Christmas is all about the presents but as you get older it becomes less important to receive gifts and more important to give gifts. Likewise the number and size of the gifts don't matter it's all about giving joy.

A little joy & appreciation can go a long way. Knowing that you're appreciated for your work can be really motivating. This is especially true with projects that might lack a financial incentive (fixing a neighbor's car, watching a friends cat, or managing an open source project). That's why in the WordPress community it's so important to give back to projects. And just like Christmas the number or size of the gifts don't matter just give to show your appreciation.

Ways to Give Back

1. Submit a Bug

Does submitting a bug really help? Absolutely. There's a lot of “bugs” that only appear in edge cases so when you can identify a bug before another developer has had to find it the hard way that's very helpful.

Most developers will be really happy when you bring a bug to their attention. Just make sure you can give them reproducible steps and that there aren't any conflicts with other software (that would be plugins or themes in the WordPress world).

2. Update Documentation

The Report documentation button on WooThemes.com

One of my favorite parts of the WooThemes.com site is the documentation section. There's this great little functionality that allows you to report a mistake or an undocumented feature on any docs page. With this little bit of functionality it makes it seamless for users to submit documentation and to send that feedback to the documentation specialist to review.

3. Send a Pull Request

Being a developer this is the most obvious way for me to give back. Go through a projects GitHub page and find a small bug that you can fix. It usually doesn't take all that long and if I can take care of something small so the developer can work on a big new feature that rewards for me.

4. Donate Money

I've purposefully put this one behind all the other ideas because I wanted to emphasize that there are so many more important ways to give back. But if you wanted to give back to a project and you just want to do something very quick you can very easily give them some money. Most of the plugins on WordPress.org already have a donate link which you can see on the plugins page in your WordPress admin.

Photo Credit: JD Hancock via Compfight cc

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