When New Year’s comes along we all make a few New Year’s resolutions that are unachievable or broken instantly but this year I made my goals more work orientated that would help me achieve more productivity and make it easier to collaborate with others. ( I actually start writing this post in February. )
One of these goals were met by finding a project management software that actually works for me instead of me working for it. I found that with Asana, It’s is as much of a project management software that I need and when I asked others to start using it there wasn’t a whole lot of backlash and they all started using it. It has cut down on the mass emails with multiple changes.
The other major goal was use of a revision system for larger project. I found that easily accomplished with GitHub.
I found listing the combination of GitHub and Asana extremely useful and productive.
Other achievements were less business-oriented but more community orientated like submitting my first bug report in both WordPress and Firefox. Both of them are confirmed as a bug. It allow me to help other users and other developers showing what I am seeing and moving the project forward it feels good to help out.
Joey Kudish, Christine Rondeau and Flynn O’Connor all encouraged me to get more involved in the WordPress community as I had been doing a lot of withdrawals and not to many deposits into the community. But 2013 has been a huge year for me in terms of me contributing to the WordPress community and I think it has to do in part with meeting Matt Mullenweg at the first BuddyCamp conference in Vancouver.
- Speaking at the local Meetup on website backgrounds
- Speaking at WordCamps in Seattle and Vancouver.
- Redoing this site to be more blog like less portfolio like.
- Learning how to create a proper trac ticket.
While I did join the UI group I found it hard to keep up with the emails and weekly meeting and such when I had project deadlines looming of my work. But also the WordPress UI group merged and for good reason with the WordPress core dev group.
New Theme
Around the same time I was looking for a new theme for robertdall.com, as my previous theme Orange Coffee had been showing it age for quite some time. The new default theme Twenty Thirteen designed by Joen Asmussen under the direction of Matt had just been themed and was in alpha stages of development. I took an active participation in the testing phase.
This lead me to learning the complete development process for default themes.
- How to create a proper trac ticket
- Connected to GitHub WordPress Repo
- Creating Git Ignore file so I can update core files without losing my content or config.
- Learning some basic command line functions.
- Learn how to test and submit patches thanks to Scribu’s post on how to contribute to WordPress.
While it’s a short list… It was a journey of sixth months taking me from barely understanding how to submit a trac ticket to actually having css committed into Twenty Thirteen.
While I like Twenty Thirteen there was a couple things I really wanted to change as well. I needed something darker and to keep the post titles above the content. Ever since wp 3.4 (June 2012) child theme were accepted into WordPress theme directory I decided to submit my very first theme to the theme review team.
So if you reading this blog post your actually seeing my first child theme that was accepted into the WordPress theme directory called R2D2.
For a guy who never makes New Year Resolutions I certainly didn’t break this one… In fact I contributed more the WordPress community then I though I was ever capable of…
What’s next?
Funny you ask that… development for the new theme Twenty Fourteen just got started and yup I plan to be involved with this one too… All this open source contributing too… It’s addictive as you get some much back in return.