One of the points of frustration – or even dismay – that people have when they have a passion for working with WordPress is the fact that they don’t have an opportunity to commit anything to core. Or, rather, they don’t have the time that they wish they had to contribute anything to core.

And it can make you feel a little guilty (though it shouldn’t).

Sure, there are a lot of open source projects that are available many of which will merge a pull request in the same day if you were to offer one, but if you’re someone who uses WordPress daily for blogging, design, and/or development, then you likely have a strong urge to commit a patch to core and to see your name show up in the credits screen.

And no, it’s not for the point of having your name listed as a core contributor or for pride or anything like that, it’s for giving something back to the software that’s given you the ability to make a living, to make a side income, or just to build cool things for cool people.

But the challenge is actually finding the time.

How do you find the time between your day-to-day schedule between work, family, projects, and so on to pour through Trac in order to find something that you’re able to work on, to patch, to submit, and then to hope it gets merged into core?

WordPress Trac

The easy answer: You make time.

Easy. Just use a black hole like in Interstellar.

But, c’mon, is that really a fair answer to give to someone who really does want to give back or who feels a sense of dismay that they aren’t able to do so for whatever circumstances?

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On November 21st, I mentioned that I was going to be switching over to Postmatic for managing my blog comments on December 1st. It’s been a great transition so far, but I thought I’d spend a little bit of time highlighting my experience with the plugin.

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Over the past few months, one of the larger items of discussion within the WordPress community is that of LoopConf.

It’s a pretty big deal because it’s the first conference of its size to be focused specifically on WordPress developers – a niché conference, if you will – but perhaps the largest point of discussion around the conference has been the point of pricing.

Interestingly enough, at the same time all of this is happening, the community has also been talking about hosting specialized conferences that cater towards specific areas of WordPress. Whereas WordCamps tend to hit bloggers, beginners, businesses, developers, and designers, some have been talking about conferences that focus specifically on one to maybe two of these types of audiences.

So LoopConf comes around and basically does both: It provides a conference that’s a proof-of-concept for the idea of specialized conferences, and it shows us how the pricing of a conference affects the attendance.

It’s really the perfect time to be hosting this type of event.

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