It's Christmas here in the United States and just about everyone will be giving and receiving gifts today. When you're a kid Christmas is all about the presents but as you get older it becomes less important to receive gifts and more important to give gifts. Likewise the number and size of the gifts don't matter it's all about giving joy.
A little joy & appreciation can go a long way. Knowing that you're appreciated for your work can be really motivating. This is especially true with projects that might lack a financial incentive (fixing a neighbor's car, watching a friends cat, or managing an open source project). That's why in the WordPress community it's so important to give back to projects. And just like Christmas the number or size of the gifts don't matter just give to show your appreciation.
Ways to Give Back
1. Submit a Bug
Does submitting a bug really help? Absolutely. There's a lot of “bugs” that only appear in edge cases so when you can identify a bug before another developer has had to find it the hard way that's very helpful.
Most developers will be really happy when you bring a bug to their attention. Just make sure you can give them reproducible steps and that there aren't any conflicts with other software (that would be plugins or themes in the WordPress world).
2. Update Documentation
The Report documentation button on WooThemes.com
One of my favorite parts of the WooThemes.com site is the documentation section. There's this great little functionality that allows you to report a mistake or an undocumented feature on any docs page. With this little bit of functionality it makes it seamless for users to submit documentation and to send that feedback to the documentation specialist to review.
3. Send a Pull Request
Being a developer this is the most obvious way for me to give back. Go through a projects GitHub page and find a small bug that you can fix. It usually doesn't take all that long and if I can take care of something small so the developer can work on a big new feature that rewards for me.
4. Donate Money
I've purposefully put this one behind all the other ideas because I wanted to emphasize that there are so many more important ways to give back. But if you wanted to give back to a project and you just want to do something very quick you can very easily give them some money. Most of the plugins on WordPress.org already have a donate link which you can see on the plugins page in your WordPress admin.
Photo Credit: JD Hancock via Compfight cc