If you want to contribute, you’re going to need to know how to use Subversion to checkout WordPress from its Subversion repository.

Before looking into how to do that, I’d say that source control is but one of the tools that a professional developer (let alone a WordPress developer) should have at his or her disposal.

So why not use this open source project to learn how to do just that?

Checkout WordPress

Granted, there are a lot of options when it comes to working with source control.but if you want to grab the latest, bleeding edge version of WordPress, or you want to commit a patch, then you’re going to need to know some of the basics of working with Subversion.

But if you want to grab the latest, bleeding edge version of WordPress, or you want to commit a patch, then you’re going to need to know some of the basics of working with Subversion.

There’s a Codex article that gives a lot of insight on how to do this and I recommend checking it out. However in a recent article for Envato, I wrote a straightforward guide for how to get started.

Checkout WordPress via Subversion

As stated in the article:

In this article, we’re going to take a look at the definition of nightly builds, how we can prepare our system for grabbing the latest version of the WordPress source code each day, and how we can use it on our own system.

Throughout the tutorial, I cover the following topics:

  • The advantages of following along with an open-source project,
  • Understanding nightly builds,
  • An introduction to version control with Subversion,
  • Installing Subversion,
  • Checking out the latest version of WordPress,
  • Installing it on your machine.

Ultimately, the goal is to get you from not knowing how to grab the latest version of the code to knowing how to install Subversion, issue commands and install the latest version of WordPress.

The article doesn’t cover how to address certain bugs or provide patches, but that would be content for another tutorial.

At the very least, this provides everything you need to know in order to get started with how to check out WordPress and experiment with features as they are being developed.