The way to learn WordPress is not by contributing
Yesterday, Matt Mullenweg gave his annual State of the Word speech, where he covered everything that has happened in WordPress this year, and what we can expect moving forward.
He mentioned the incredible growth of WordPress over other platforms, and even mentioned learn.wordpress.org and the learning resource it’s budding into.
As always, he extolled the virtues of open source and the importance of contributing. He spent several minutes on Five for the Future, a program encouraging companies who make money with WordPress to give 5% of their time to the open source project.
He also talked about how creators could now contribute by adding their work to the Openverse.
As I’ve stated many times, if you find value in something, you should absolutely ensure it continues to exist, either by paying for it, or in this case, contributing. WordPress has provided me immeasurable value over the years, and I’ve tried to contribute where I could.
But when he was asked by Allie Nimmons and Michelle Frechette what new/young people can do to learn WordPress, he said that it’s easier than ever to contribute. Matt was basically saying if you want to learn WordPress, contribute to WordPress. While I encourage people to contribute, I don’t think the best way to learn WordPress is by contributing.