I think the hardest thing about getting into contributing to WordPress Core is knowing where to start. Once you have your development environment setup ready to go – then what? You need something to work on, you need a ticket.
The best place for new contributors to start is the Good First Bugs For New Contributors report. These tickets are marked with the keyword ‘good-first-bug‘ and have been flagged by more experienced core contributors as a good place to start.
Keep in mind that although they are marked as good for new contributors, it doesn’t mean they are easy. It just means they are fairly self-contained and won’t take you down a rabbit hole
So what does this have to do with a Twitter bot? Well, I have always wanted to make a one so I decided to create one that tweeted out WordPress core tickets marked as ‘good-first-bugs’.
Yesterday, I activated @GoodFirstBugs. Which sends a tweet every 15 minutes with a little randomly generated message and link to a WordPress Core ticket from the Good First Bugs For New Contributors list.
It’s a Node.js app that is hosted on Heroku and the source code is on Github .
I want to thank my friend and fellow 10upper Dominic Magnifico for his help and maybe some code :). He’s a great guy, a kickass developer and could lift you with one hand. His Congressbot is really cool and was the inspiration for me wanting to create a bot of my own.
I’d also like to thank the WordPress community on Twitter as well. Since it’s activation, @GoodFirstBugs has been getting a steady stream of followers and is being retweeted all over the place.
I am so happy and honored that this small project has been so well received – thank you!
Please leave suggestions for the bot, questions or comments below!