In this interview, we delve into Carolina’s journey with WordPress, starting from her first experience with the platform and her reasons for choosing it. Carolina Nymark shares how she began contributing to the open-source community, highlighting her early involvement in theme development and the WordPress Theme Review Team. We also explore her significant contributions, including leadership roles in theme development and the creation of educational resources like fullsiteediting.com.
Can you share your first experience with WordPress, and what made you choose it?
I had blogged on different websites for years, and eventually, I wanted and needed to use more than plain HTML. I tried different tools, including Joomla, before switching to WordPress. I don’t remember why; it was probably recommended to me.
How did you start contributing to open-source projects, and what was your first contribution to the WordPress community?
Not long after finding WordPress, I knew wanted to create themes. I submitted my broken themes, learned from the feedback from the Theme Review Team, and started testing and doing code reviews of other theme submissions.
It took longer for my “contributions” to WordPress to be meaningful. I owe a lot to the handful of long-term contributors who were patient with my mistakes and helped me improve.
What are some important projects or contributions you have made within the WordPress ecosystem?
While I reviewed themes submitted to the theme directory, I did a couple of thousand reviews.
It was a great honor to be one of the theme development leads for Twenty Twenty-One and Twenty Twenty-Five. I enjoy creating themes, but my motivation has changed over the years. Now, it is less about the single end product, the theme itself, and more about trying to push theme development forward: Implementing new features that theme developers and designers are asking for and solving problems and bugs that we encounter. Contributing to WordPress core and the block editor is more meaningful to me because, hopefully, it will help everyone, no matter what theme they are using.
Also, I don’t think I can answer this question without mentioning the site fullsiteediting.com, where I publish tutorials about block themes and theme.json. I created this site when block themes were new, and the official documentation was missing because so many features were still experimental. I hope I have helped theme developers learn how block themes work and helped them decide if it is something they want to create and use for themselves or their clients.
In your opinion, what are the best ways to engage and attract new developers to the WordPress community, and how can we make the onboarding process more welcoming and inclusive?
The Contributor Mentorship program* is a great way to introduce new contributors to both the community and contributing to WordPress. Connecting with an experienced contributor that you can message and ask questions makes a huge difference.
There are many paths a person can take when they want to start contributing. They may watch a video on learn.wordpress.org, read the developer code reference, or read the core contributor handbook. All of these resources could be improved, and they could also do a better job of cross-linking so the visitor can be guided to the right place.
Many developers may want to contribute because they need a specific bug fixed or a new feature added. The waiting time for a first reply on an open issue is often too long, and the time it takes for a change to be committed to WordPress varies. This can be discouraging, but it is a difficult problem to solve.
