Contributions

WordPress is an open-source project, freely developed by thousands of developers. If you use WordPress and develop something that might be useful to others, you should contribute it as well so the WordPress project can continue to grow.

One of the conditions I add to all of my contracts regards contributions:

“If I develop any useful piece of code that can be generalized and used to further the WordPress project, I will contribute it as a tutorial, plugin, or patch to WordPress core. However, I will never resell or give away the code to your website in whole to another party.”

» Plugins

Plugins are where I put pieces of functionality average WordPress users might also find useful. Whether it’s the ability to easily view all the images attached to the current post or a simple shortcode for generating dynamic listings of content, these are all things I’ve developed for clients and released publicly.

By releasing them as plugins, I can easily reuse them on future projects, add bug fixes and enhancements which the client can easily apply (click “Update Plugin”), and receive help on those fixes and enhancements from the community.

» Tutorials

Tutorials are more for developers. As I come up with clever solutions to problems or even find myself reusing a snippet of code often, I document it on my blog. My blog serves as my personal code repository, and hopefully others can learn from it too.

» Code Snippets

Even more developer-focused than tutorials. This is my growing collection of snippets, most with only a line or two of description. If something isn’t large enough for a tutorial or I just want to find a piece of code again in the future, this is where I put it.

» Themes

Since most of my work is building custom themes for clients, I haven’t had the chance to release many publicly. Hopefully in the future I’ll be able to release more.

» Patches

If I find a bug in WordPress, or (more likely) build a feature that I think might work well in core, I’ll submit it as a WordPress core patch. I’ve only done a few so far and none have been accepted, but it’s better to put these bugs/enhancements out in the open where they might make it into core than keep them private.

StudioPress has also been kind enough to invite me and a few other developers into their company’s private Trac, where we can submit and comment on bugs, enhancements, and the future of Genesis. I’ve developed patches that have been added to multiple versions of Genesis, and commented on many others. This gives me a level of control over the future of Genesis and makes me more comfortable to develop with it.

» Developer Tools

While some of these might be plugins or themes, they are all designed to be customized and used specifically by developers.