WordPress Development Workflow
June 22, 2010
This guide is for anyone interested in learning how to contribute to the WordPress project.
Before beginning, make sure you have an account on Trac. This is the bug tracking software WordPress uses. The core developers have made it quite clear that any code submitted without a ticket will probably never see the light of day, so this is a critical step.
Once you've chosen a ticket from the queue, open up your terminal and check out the latest code revision (using Subversion):
mkdir wordpress cd wordpress svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/trunk/ . svn up
Make your changes and be sure to test them thoroughly. I personally prefer to develop in a private (offline) WordPress environment so there is no risk of anything breaking in production.
When you're ready to submit your work, generate the diff:
svn diff > NNNNN.diff # NNNNN is the ticket number in Trac
Now simply attach the diff to the ticket and describe the changes. Add has-patch to the Keywords field and make any additional necessary comments. Try to be as clear and concise as possible.
This should be enough to get you up and running. Check out the official documentation for more information.