I’ve had some extra time on my hand recently and while I am not quite ready to start looking for full-time work, I have been thinking about code recently and I’m back to thinking about the contribution process to WordPress. Grunt Patch WordPress is a tool that helps people contribute code to WordPress and that I estimate has saved many hours for contributors.
Grunt Patch WordPress started as a standardization of some helpers for interacting with Trac. I knew about a ruby script that Mark Jaquith was using along with some bash scripts Nacin had. This was around when WordPress first switched to having a public build process so it was time.
Patches to WordPress come in many shapes and sizes. They can be generated from SVN or GIT. They can come from the build repository or the develop repository. They can become stale due to files being moved. They can be set up as PRs on GitHub. Grunt Patch WordPress takes care of all of this so developers of WordPress can focus on the content of the patch and not the details of how it was created.
Despite working well and saving hundreds of hours since it was introduced in nine years ago, there are areas of improvement that I think would help improve the tool.
Changes I would like to make
1. Save passwords to keychains
Right now, the patch uploading is a bit more difficult than it needs to be. If Passwords and Usernames could be securely stored, this would save a little bit of time each time someone wants to upload a patch.
2. Better Github Intgration
Right now you can manually enter a GitHub PR and it will apply it as a patch. However, the patches aren’t listed when selecting them by just entering a ticket number. As more contributors work on GitHub, this is becoming more and more important.
3. Code Modernization
Right now there are outdated libraries used. Additionally, nine years ago things like promises were in their infancy. I would like to improve the code in general so it’s easier for more developers to work with Grunt Patch WordPress.
Want to help Grunt Patch WordPress?
As the original author and primary maintainer, I think I am in the best position to make these changes. If you are interested in sponsoring this work to help people contribute to WordPress, please get in touch. I’m also considering Github Sponsors as a way to help crowdsource funding to support these changes.
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