Handing a patch to a mentor

Hand it to a mentor is the destination on the Review & submit changes screen for the contributor who will not create a GitHub account today — common at a contributor day, where a mentor collects patches and pushes them on the contributors' behalf. It needs no accounts at all. Someone else pushes the patch, and the props still land on you.

What the app asks for

The first time, the card asks for two things:

• WordPress.org username — required. This is who the work is credited to.
• Event — optional. Where the patch was written: "WordCamp Europe 2026", a meetup, a company contributor day. It is free text, because most of these are named the day they happen.

Click Remember this. Both values are remembered for every site — they are facts about you, not about one checkout. On a shared laptop, click Change these and clear them before the next person takes over.

Saving the patch

Click Save patch as your-username. The app saves a patch file that carries its own provenance, as comment lines before the diff:

# WordPress Contributor Toolkit patch
# Contributor: janedoe (wordpress.org)
# Event: WordCamp Europe 2026
# Ticket: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/62281
# Base: trunk @ a1b2c3d, 2026-08-09
# Generated: 2026-08-10

On a Gutenberg site, the work-item line is # Issue: https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/71234, using the linked issue's number. Core sites keep the Trac ticket line shown above.

The header says who made the patch, at which event, for which ticket or issue, against which trunk revision, and when. A field the app does not know is left out rather than written as "unknown", so a mentor can trust the lines that are there. The # lines are ignored by git apply, patch, and Trac's own tooling, so the file applies exactly like a plain diff.

Under the button, the card confirms what the header will claim — The patch will say it was written at …, or "No event on the patch" — on every save, so a remembered event from last year cannot stamp patches unnoticed.

The file name

The suggested filename carries the ticket or issue number and your username:

• 62281.janedoe.diff when a ticket or issue numbered 62281 is linked to the site
• janedoe.diff when none is

The username is in the filename because it is what a mentor sorts a folder of patches by; the header is what survives if someone renames the file.

What the mentor does with it

For Core, the mentor uploads the patch to the Trac ticket or turns it into a pull request. For Gutenberg, they apply it to a Gutenberg checkout and open a pull request citing the issue. The header tells them — and whoever assigns props — whose work it is and what it was based on, so the credit follows the file, not the account that uploaded it.