For the uninitiated, Contributor Day is a day where people get together to work on various areas of https://make.wordpress.org/. There are many teams that people can participate in, each with a different focus.

Everyone can contribute to WordPress, no matter what your skill level. You do not need to be a developer to contribute to contribute back to WordPress. There are many areas which other skills are required, e.g. translating WordPress from English to other languages like Chinese or Malay.

As part of WordCamp Singapore 2019 we will be holding a WordPress Contributor & Workshop Day on Saturday 17th August at General Assembly, so stick around after the Conference and see how you can make a real difference to WordPress.

The WordCamp Singapore Contributor Day is very laid back. We’re going to start with a special talk by WordPress Core Contributor and WP_Image_Editor maintainer Mike Schroder. He’ll be sharing from his story on how to get started with contributing to WordPress.

Next, we’ll do a short overview of all of the different ways you can contribute to WordPress, then break off into groups to complete the project/activity for your desired contribution area.

We’ll be running some workshops alongside the contributor sessions headed by WordPress or industry experts so join us if you want to learn something!

The schedule for the Contributor Day is available on our Schedule page!

The WordPress software is freely provided through the work of volunteers. Every year, local communities all over the world  gather to contribute their time back to the project in whatever way they feel comfortable, whether its

• sharing why you use WordPress,
• following a list of instructions to test new WordPress features,
• helping others,
• producing and editing videos,
• writing and editing training curriculum,
• coming up with marketing ideas,
• and so much more.

WordPress areas you can contribute to

There are many areas which you can contribute to. Here are some of the areas which we can focus our contribution efforts on the day:

• Core: You can write code, fix bugs, debate decisions, and help with WordPress development.
  You will need to have a local development tool set up on your Laptop
• UI: The UI group is focused on designing and developing the user interface. It’s a home for designers and UXers alike.
• Accessibility: Make sure that the WordPress core and all of WordPress’ resources are accessible.
  You will need to have a local development tool set up on your Laptop
• Mobile: Help with the iOS, Android, Windows, and Blackberry apps. They need designer, UX experts, and testers to give users a smooth experience on every device.
• Support: Answering a question in the support forums or IRC is one of the easiest ways to start contributing. Everyone knows the answer to something! You may need to have access to a test WordPress site (to be able to reproduce problems people mention)
• Polyglots: WordPress is used all over the world and in many different languages. If you’re a polyglot, contribute by translating WordPress into your own language.
• Themes: Reviewing Themes sharpens your own Theme development skills. You can help out and join the discussion on the blog.
  You will need to have a local development tool set up on your Laptop
• Documentation: Helping people help themselves when they get stuck.
• Community: Working to support events, to create outreach and training programs, and generally support the community.
• Meta: The Meta team makes WordPress.org, provides support and builds tools for use by all the contributor groups.
• BuddyPress: Support the tool which builds WordPress communities.

FAQs

Do I have to be a developer?

No, there are many ways to give back to WordPress. Contributor days are for everyone, on every experience level. Even someone who knows very little about WordPress can contribute by sharing why they use WordPress. So if you can create a WordPress post, Contributor Day is for you!

For example, translating WordPress can be done through GlotPress. (However, for more accurate translations, we encourage contributors to have a development environment to check if the translations make sense on the interface.)

What do I need to bring or prep myself with?

A laptop. Unfortunately, most of the work, if not all, can only be done via laptop.

How do I prepare myself to contribute?

For many of the areas, you will need to have a local development tool set up on your laptop.

For more information on all these areas go to https://make.WordPress.org

Who are the leads for each area?

At the moment:

• Polyglots: Robert, WordPress General Translator Editor for Chinese (Singapore) and WordPress Project Translator Editor for Chinese (China). Note: you may contribute to other languages, however the turnaround time for the approval of your translations may vary.

If you would like to lead other areas, let us know!

I am hungry…

Lunch will be provided. However as we are estimating the attendance from the ticket sales, the lunch will be provided on first come first serve basis with priority to participants who have paid for a ticket to Conference Day.

Here is our third round of 9 fantastic speakers lined up for WordCamp Singapore 2019. We’re in the final stages of confirming the last few speakers for a full conference day and plenty of action at the Contributors day…

Turn Lead Generation on its head

Stephanie Campanella

Do you struggle to find the right clients who are willing to pay what you’re worth? What if there was a way for you to turn the tide, and have the clients find you.

Stephanie has a love for fine art and a knack for computers Graphic Design seemed the right ‘fit’ for her. As she moved out of college and started ‘working for the man’ she was retrenched and left stranded. Steph quickly realised she had to take action and forge her own destiny.

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WP Plugin Development Basics

Carl Alberto

Extending your WP site beyond blogging. This workshop will include example usage of action hooks, filter hooks, custom post types, taxonomies, custom fields and wp_query.

Carl is a Senior Customer Success Engineer in Pantheon Systems where he assists site launches, optimizations, security and troubleshooting complex WordPress builds on the platform.

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Managing your online presence on Google Search

Aldrich Christopher

In this session, you will learn how you can optimize your websites for users and to be compatible with Google search engine. You will learn how search works. You will be given tips on how to do well on search and explore tools that Google offers which you can use to manage your online presence on Google Search.

Aldrich Christopher is a Webmaster Outreach Strategist at Google Asia Pacific, helping webmasters across the region to create better content and websites.

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It’s never too late to find the right career path

Afsana Multani

It’s all about “Never Give up”! During my talk, I will be sharing a real-life story. My Afsana – a short story (that’s the meaning of my name), how I settle down with WordPress, and how WordPress inspires me to work for oneself as well as for the community. Support and helping people become one of the core objectives of my life. Everything is possible if you are ready for a change – there’s no right time, and proper age to start a new start 🙂 I believe, if I can do this, you can do this even better.

Afsana has a beautiful background as an Artist, but WordPress is her adventure since she learned about WordPress and its vast community; she enjoys learning and exploring experience in Customer Support and recently started an initiative called “iamwplearner,” as a knowledge-sharing activity with a dream of helping the local as well as WordPress community through different channels and languages.

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Get Started with Contributing

Nicky Lim

In early 2019, I took a class at Cornell University on contributing to Open Source and worked with a team of 6 under the guidance of a WordPress mentor. I will share my experience as a first-time contributor to WordPress: how I familiarized myself with the codebase, got in touch with the WordPress Core (Privacy) and Gutenberg community, and pushed my first few patches out.

Nicky believes some of the best code ever written is in the Open Source community and it has become a key source of software that runs our digital world today. As such, it is valuable to understand the ecosystem to benefit our own projects and to enable us to contribute back.

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Gutenberg blocks in 30 minutes

Shramee Srivastav

We roll out quick Gutenberg blocks with and without attributes. This is done via Caxton which is a free plugin I have developed. It was also appreciated and demoed by Matt in WCUS 2018 SOTW.

Shramee started coding at the age of seven and loves to travel code and play football. Shramee has developed popular plugins Caxton, Pootle Pagebuilder, WooBuilder, Pootle Slider, Storefront Pro and more…

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WordPress 101

Marikit Valmadrid

This workshop will highlight the wonderful possibilities you can create and build with WordPress as well as how this applies to a different industry or user types. Whether you are a blogger, a designer, or developer, or if you still do not know how to start and maximize WordPress this workshop is for you.

Kit is the Community Manager of the Philippine Web Designers Organization and an active core member of the WordPress User Group Philippines. She loves to contribute to the Tech Community.

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Elementor Workshop

M. Asif Rahman

Asif is a long-time WordPress Enthusiast, Serial Entrepreneur and Angel Investor. Asif has been working closely with WordPress since 2004. Asif is the Founder CEO of ARCom, a media company that does everything in WordPress, helps enterprise-level WordPress clients, and serves several Fortune-500 clients.

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AMA WordPress Helpdesk

Shaan Nicol

Got a problem that you can’t solve? Come and see me at the helpdesk, Shaan and the team will do their best to answer your questions and offer tips and suggestions.

Born in New Zealand, made in Singapore. With a long history in web design and development, Shaan has been building websites in various forms for over 20 years.

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That’s 9 more talks from some seriously talented people that we have lined up for WordCamp Singapore 2019. Subscribe or follow us on social media to be the first to know when the final few of speakers will be announced.

We’ve also published our draft schedule for both the Conference Day as well as the Contributors Day, so make sure you check it out and find out more about all of our sessions and speakers.

Here is our second round of 7 fantastic speakers lined up for WordCamp Singapore 2019

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How WordPress Changed My Life!

Ricky Blacker

This talk tells of how ‘discovering’ WordPress became a life-changing experience – how I was adopted into the WordPress community who are now like family to me, and how attending WordCamp Sydney in 2014 lead to a series of events that paved the way to me acquiring my dream job.

Ricky is a self-taught web professional who found and fell in love with WordPress, and the community behind it while looking for a CMS platform to build websites for clients.

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Turning your own development needs into sellable products.

Eric Tracz

Running a business with a WordPress site is relatively easy. Tens of thousands of plugins out there to help a lot, but sometimes it’s hard to find a perfectly tailored solution. Often, you do end up developing custom code for your site. Consider putting a bit extra effort and convert that custom solution into a sellable product. That can not only cover the cost of initial development and maintenance but also present another revenue stream.

Eric Tracz is a digital nomad currently living in Kuala Lumpur. Co-Founder and CEO of PeepSo.com and TwistPress.com. I began my journey with Open Source about a decade ago and never regretted it. I care about creating beautiful and useful solutions for WordPress. What’s more important, solutions which are also fully supported by the very people creating them.

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Content strategies for Lead Generation and SEO

Ivan So

This is the content strategy framework that I use to generate income for my agency as well as my clients.

• Content multiplication strategy to leverage from 1 source of content to be across 5 channels
• Lead generation concepts and how to implement with SEO and other marketing channels

Ivan has 15 years of experience of SEO and WordPress and has built over 350 WordPress sites for clients. He’s the co-organiser of Hong Kong WordPress meetup and the lead organiser of Hong Kong WordCamp 2019.

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Designing with Gutenberg

Sam Suresh

With the new editor Gutenberg, the entire editing experience has been rebuilt for media-rich pages and posts. Experience the flexibility that blocks will bring, whether you are building your first site, or write code for a living. This talk will walk you through some basic and advanced features of Gutenberg Editor.

Sam Suresh is the founder of MU DOT MY PLT, a tech development & training company based in Kuala Lumpur. He contributes to open source projects in his free time. Sam contributes to WordPress as a Global Community Team member. He also organizes WordCamps and Meetups.

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Bring JAMstack to the WordPress community

Seiji Akatsuka

When is your site not built with the JAMstack? Is it a site built with a server-side CMS like WordPress? No, I’d like to share some idea about front end and back end to bring JAMstack to the world’s most popular CMS.

Seiji Akatsuka is a member of WordCamp Tokyo 2019, an organizer of AWS APAC User Community and AWS Samurai 2016. He is very interested in developing the tech community in APAC Area.

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SEO for business results with WordPress

Matt Knighton

In this talk, we will discuss how to do that as well as showcase studies of real results. We will cover content, site structure, site speed, AMP and structured data, measurement and Google search console, monitoring and social media automation. With these 7 items, you too will be able to get great results from organic traffic.

Matt is an Entrepreneur, Business Consultant, Speaker, Software Developer, Business Analyst and Founder of multiple IT companies and has worked as a business analyst for some of the world’s largest banks and communications organisations.

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Getting more done in less time – introducing WordPress automation using Ansible.

Hazrul Azhar Jamari

This presentation is a comparison of Managed WooCommerce Hosting (Pantheon, Nestify) and WooCommerce-as-a-service solutions (WooCart). It describes similarities and differences, and what it means to the non-techies who wish to use WooCommerce as their tech stack for their e-Commerce business.

Hazrul is a family man, entrepreneur, software engineer, and foodie, and has been building startups all his life. He has gone through a complete cycle of E-Commerce from training, building online and mobile e-store, building payment gateways and building a fulfilment and distribution system throughout his career.

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That’s 7 more talks from some seriously talented people that we have lined up for WordCamp Singapore 2019. Subscribe or follow us on social media to be the first to know when the next round of speakers will be announced.

With just under 6 weeks to go until WordCamp Singapore 2019, we’re happy to announce the first 6 presentations!

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Images in WordPress: How do they work?

Mike Schroder

A walk-though of the current way that image uploads are handled in WordPress, and some of the improvements coming in 5.3. Attendees will learn about the limitations and strengths of the current systems and hear thoughts on how this can be improved in the future.

Mike Schroder is a cross-cultural kid, coffee enthusiast, and supporter of Open Source. As a full-time contributor sponsored by GoDaddy, he’s a WordPress committer and previous release lead. He is one of the maintainers of media and authors of WP_Image_Editor, the current base infrastructure for handling images in WordPress.

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Face Your Fear: The Headless WordPress!

Ian Labao

A detailed run through how you can fully utilize WordPress as a headless CMS with a demo on how it all works.

Ian is an experienced and ambitious software consultant/engineer looking for challenging roles in the IT industry with expertise in working with the latest technologies in diverse types of projects

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COPE with WordPress

Leonardo Losoviz

COPE (Create Once, Publish Everywhere) is a technique which allows to publish content across different platforms from a single source of truth, enabling to feed content to dissimilar platforms such as web, emails, or an iOS or Android app, while minimizing the amount of duplicated information and reducing maintenance to the minimum possible.

Leonardo Losoviz is an independent open source developer, creator of a framework for building modular websites called [PoP]. The only non-musician in his family, this doesn’t bother him, because coding is also making art. He lives in a loop: he dreams of code and, when he wakes up, he codes his dreams. He is based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

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Secure WordPress Without Coding Skills

Francesca Marano

Is WordPress insecure? Not at all! However, an outdated WordPress installation with a weak password and poorly chosen plugins is definitely insecure.

Francesca is the WordPress Community Manager at SiteGround, web hosting company. She is part of the WordPress community team, organizing meetups and WordCamps in Torino and taking part in many other WordPress events worldwide.

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How and Why to Publish Your Site on IPv6

Lawrence Hughes

IPv6 is the next generation Internet Protocol. Already some 27% of global traffic is going over it, and many countries are already over 50%. Many mobile service providers are already over 90% IPv6. It is important for you to provide your content over both IPv4 and IPv6 and with WordPress it is actually quite simple. I will show you how to do this.

Lawrence is Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Sixscape Communications and has a total of 45+ years in IT, in computer graphics, cybersecurity, messaging and networking,

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Getting more done in less time – introducing WordPress automation using Ansible.

Ivan Yordanov

When you are creating and managing WordPress sites for a living, regardless if you are a freelancer or working for an agency, it’s always great to see your customer base increasing. This, however, leads to the question – what happens when you start struggling with the time for managing all of your client’s sites? The answer is actually pretty simple – automation.

Ivan Yordanov is providing infrastructure and application support to the SiteGround enterprise clients. He has helped with the launch and has been involved in the maintenance of many complex multi-server infrastructures for big WordPress projects.

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These are just 6 of the amazing talks that we have lined up for WordCamp Singapore 2019. Subscribe or follow us on social media to be the first to know when the next round of speakers will be announced.