Hacktoberfest® is an online event and celebration of the open-source community. The event encourages everyone in the global open-source community to make an extra effort to participate throughout the month of October. Whether you have been contributing to the open-source community for years or are just looking to get started, it is a great opportunity to help out, learn, and give back.
How We Contribute
The staff at Hall participate by contributing to open-source projects within our industry. This includes anything our staff is interested in, and everything in between. We often end up making contributions to WordPress and WooCommerce core on behalf of our clients whenever we run into an issue that might affect the community. It is a way for us to give back to a community that has given so much to us and the internet as a whole.
We also contribute to our own open-source projects. These include starter themes and plugins we feel would help other developers, where established solutions don’t already exist.
WordPress Themes
Our Scaffolding starter theme framework was built as we became more committed to WordPress as a CMS solution for our clients. We wanted something lightweight and barebones to help us get started when designing a site tailored to our clients’ needs. We also wanted a theme that keeps us DRY (Don’t repeat yourself). We eventually felt our framework could be a useful tool to other developers and released it as an open-source project.
WordPress Plugins
We have also released a few WordPress/WooCommerce plugins. Our Gravity Forms Email Blacklist and WooCommerce Address Book plugins were both created out of a need from one of our clients. Upon creating the custom solutions, we found that these plugins offered answers to problems other developers had been facing, and released them to the open-source community.
Other Projects
We have also contributed to other open-source projects. We are in a unique position where we are able to help our clients benefit from this open-source software, while also testing it in live environments with real users. This lets us find unique cases that other contributing developers may have not seen, and offer our help to both benefit our clients and the open-source community.
What It Takes to Contribute
You don’t need to be a developer to contribute to the open-source community. Participation can be as simple as reporting an issue, writing documentation, or helping someone use the software. That is the real power of the open-source community; everyone who is willing to help is a part of the development team.
Conclusion
Hacktoberfest 2020 has ended, but that doesn’t mean you can’t contribute. Anytime you find an issue or have an idea for improving an open-source project, share it with the community. Every little bit counts.
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