I didn’t set out to contribute to WordPress. I was just curious about a new feature.
In WordPress 6.6, a new auto-rollback feature was being tested—something designed to help users recover automatically when a plugin update breaks their site. I’d heard about it through the usual community chatter and decided to give it a try. I figured at the very least, I’d learn something new. What I didn’t expect was to become part of the release process.
Following testing instructions from Andy Fragen and Colin Stewart, I installed a special plugin that was intentionally built to trigger a PHP error. The goal was to see how WordPress handled failure—and how the new rollback system would recover from it. The test went smoothly. WordPress detected the problem, rolled the plugin back to the previous version, and sent me an email.
But that email? It left me a little uncertain. It worked—but it didn’t fully explain what had happened. Which plugin had failed? What was restored? Did the update go through at all?
I shared my feedback with the team: make the notification email more descriptive. A few tweaks to language could make a big difference in user confidence, especially for people who aren’t developers. The idea was simple—don’t just tell users something happened, tell them what and why.
That small suggestion became my first real contribution to WordPress core.
It wasn’t a patch or a line of code, but it was part of the process. The developers had done an incredible job making the testing environment clear and easy to follow. It felt approachable. And that changed everything for me.
Since then, I’ve given a few talks about this feature—how it works, why it matters, and how it makes WordPress safer for everyday users. As part of my role at Kinsta, I’ve been lucky to speak with developers and agency owners about tools like this and how we can all make the web more resilient.
I used to think contributing to WordPress meant writing complex code. Now I see it’s really about showing up, being curious, and offering what you can—even if it’s just a better subject line in an email.
So if you’ve ever thought about contributing but weren’t sure where to start, this is your nudge: try something. Test a feature. Ask a question. Suggest an improvement. You might be more helpful than you think.