Many good software developers struggle and become frustrated when contributing to open source software. That’s because the skill set required for contributing to open source software is different from that required for writing closed source software.
About three years ago we decided to put our flagship WordPress plugin, Event Espresso, on Github in order to facilitate community contributions. It has always been open source (meaning the code that runs it is viewable by anyone who downloads it), but that made it much more accessible for contributions. Since then we have received numerous pull requests (requests to have code added to it), but not all contributions were ready. The purpose of this post is to help software developers better understand how to contribute to Event Espresso, WordPress, or any open source software. (more…)