During my WordCamp Edinburgh talk, I was saying just how easy it can be to contribute to WordPress. Here’s an example of my own from just yesterday.

(cue cloudy dream sequence)

It all started with this Tweet in my timeline…

It occurred to me that VIP clients often refer to whitelists and blacklists and I knew we’d recently implemented a self service way for them to implement them. So I checked… we refer to it as an “allow” list. Great.

But I had a nagging feeling WordPress used it somewhere.

And I was right. Sign into WP Admin and head to Settings -> Discussion and scroll down…

Ah, yeah, that’s not… optimal.

So, WordPress uses Trac for recording issues (which is pretty poor, imo) and my search-fu on Trac is pretty terrible. Chances are it’s been raised already, despite me not finding any reference to this already. But, I open a new ticket.

Now, I wondered about going ahead and making the change but for the reasons I mentioned (it may have already been raised) and really just to check with the community that this is the right plan of action, I didn’t. Within 7 hours, Aaron Jorbin, a regular core contributor did. Some further comments were added, tweaks made to the code change and within 9 hours, it was closed with a code change committed for WordPress 5.4.

For those interested, here’s my ticket and here’s the eventual code change.

There is one item remaining – when you head into that Settings page, and click on the Help tab at the top-right, it points you to documentation on WordPress.org. That too will need changing, but not until 5.4 is released. Thankfully, I’ve been known to volunteer for the Documentation team so, at the time, I’ll request access and that modified as well.

And that is how easy it can be. And with a change for the best that will then make it way to over 34% of the web.

Update

The beta of WordPress 5.4 is now out and so my change can be seen…

Now displays as…