1. Introduction
Greetings everyone! My name is Enrique Manrique Ruiz, I’m a Web Application Development (DAW) student. Here is my final report from participating in the WP Credits Course. This report will outline my contributions to the WordPress ecosystem in relation to the activities I did during my internship, the challenges I faced while doing those activities, and the skills I gained as a direct result of working on these activities. I hope this report inspires other people to become contributors to Open Source Projects!
2. Teams and Projects to which I contributed
Team: Polyglots (WordPress Localization Team)
Project Focus: During these past weeks I have been focused on translating and localising various WordPress plugins and themes from English into Spanish (Castellano). The main objective was to create an understandable way for the everyday person to understand technical terminology, while also ensuring that the Spanish version could function seamlessly when added to the WordPress dashboard without causing layout errors / issues.
3. Learning Resources Guides and Tutorials: The first resources I used to get familiar with the dashboard were the introductory courses offered on http://www.wordpress.org. After that I used the official Polyglots Handbook and the translation guidelines that the Spanish community created. Also Nilo Vélez´s advices about translations were really helpful.
Community Channels: Whenever I required help with translations or maintaining consistency among all translations, I sought help in the official WordPress Slack channels.
4. Challenges & Solutions
Technical Challenge: Difficulties arose with translating third-party software strings when we had no reference for where they existed in the actual plugin’s user interface. To overcome this obstacle, I tested each translation in a local environment so I could learn from it and verify the length of the Spanish text would fit correctly within the plugin.
Consistency Challenge: Some technical terms are translated from English to Spanish with multiple meanings. To ensure consistency and accuracy for all translations, I reviewed community glossaries and actively participated on the WordPress Slack Community to stay current with accepted standards of translation.
5. My Contributions
All of my translation work has been incorporated into this website and organized into eight separate posts (in addition to this “Final Note”).
6. Key Learnings from the WP Credits Course
I learned valuable lessons about how Open Source Software works through collaboration and the power of the Internet to connect individuals across continents as well as the importance of community guidelines and common terminology for all members of a global community on large scale. I also developed skills for communicating remotely and asynchronously with a team of members from around the world using tools such as Slack.
7. New Skills Gained
Through this project, I have developed both professional and interpersonal skills:
Technical Skills: Content management in WordPress, software localization, handling language files, and basic QA testing for web layouts.
Soft Skills: Asynchronous communication, time management, and problem-solving.
8. Personal Reflections and Next Steps
Contributing to WordPress has been a highly rewarding experience for my web development career. I was surprised by how structured and welcoming the open-source community is to students. Moving forward, I want to apply these localization best practices to my future web development projects and keep an eye on open-source tools.
Thank you to the WordPress community and my mentors for this opportunity!
