Over the weekend, I attended WordCamp Pittsburgh. (Woo!)
WordCamp Pittsburgh also marked my first WordCamp as a presenter! My talk was titled “Your New BFFs – The WordPress Core Tables + The MySQL Database.”
If there’s any one, true calling I feel I have in the world of tech, it’s the database. The structure and format of a database speaks to my organized soul. Must. organize. all. the. data.
When I started using WordPress about a year ago, I was immediately curious about how the database worked. What were the WordPress core tables and what data did they store?
Wondering if others were curious as well, I submitted my talk to WordCamp Pittsburgh and was selected as a speaker!
During my research, one of the resources I found was the database description. I noticed a few pieces of information were missing, and two of the relationships were incorrect.
I finished my presentation and gave it at WordCamp, but I asked around about the article and what could be done about the missing and incorrect information.
At the encouragement of a few fellow attendees, I joined the WordPress slack group. I looked around and posed a question to the group, “Hi! I’m totally new around here, but I have a question/possible correction on the database description. Is this the place I should ask and/or can someone direct me to the proper place?”
To which someone replied, “If you want to make a correction, please do so. You can login and edit the page.”
This was about how I felt.
But, having brought it up, I couldn’t back out now. Plus, I knew there were additions and corrections that needed to be made, and if not me, then who?
I’m proud to say I did it. I contributed to the project!
There are tons of ways you can contribute as well (and you don’t even have to be a coder):
- From the Codex, Contributing to WordPress
- Make WordPress
- The Ultimate Guide to Giving Back to the WordPress Community (who doesn’t love an ultimate guide AND an awesome Gilmore Girls gif?)
- Five for the Future
- There are Many Ways to Contribute to WordPress
In case you’re interested, here are the slides from my presentation or you can watch the full presentation on wordpress.tv.
Thanks for stopping by!