Contributing to WordPress

I know the big dogs are fighting (and disclaimer I work for one of the big dogs and I used to make my living building websites using a theme framework the other one owns now), but a ton of contributors contribute because they want to help the community.

Not because they were sponsored, though I found a company that would pay me to do what I’d do anyhow, but because they felt the empowerment that an open-source community could give and wanted to help give that to others.

I’ve contributed at least some little piece of code to every major release of WordPress from 3.6 until 6.5 (sabbatical and ended up not getting anything into the latest 6.6 release).

I donate my own money to the Foundation.

I’ve spoken at WordCamps and meetups (though it has been awhile ) and led Contributor Days—hell, even one at WP Engine’s office way before their Silver Lake days.

I’ve released and maintained free plugins—including one used, at one point, on over 100k sites that use the WP Engine-owned Genesis framework that has over 1.1M downloads.

I’ve admin’d the default theme demo sites since Twenty Twenty.

I don’t do any of that because Automattic wants me to—though they do and they celebrate it internally—but because WordPress changed my life.

Matt isn’t perfect. I don’t always agree with him and don’t always agree with how he does things. I’ve found over the 11 years I’ve worked with him that we’re usually aligned in principle, but I don’t think he always communicates or executes it as well as I think he could while in my comfortable armchair.

I don’t contribute for Matt. I’m not going to stop because of Matt. As long as WordPress and the WordPress community continue to change lives like it has mine, I’m going to keep contributing.

I have things to say about the fight, but I don’t want to lose sight of individuals contributing because they want to contribute is a huge, huge part of what has made WordPress.