Myself and other members of the WordPress community are in the process of launching a site that will help crowd fund WordPress projects.

After tweeting about the idea, a huge amount of community support has already been garnered for the project and a lot of prominent members of the community are interested in the project.

The goal of the site will be to provide a means for WordPress projects to find and obtain needed funding for getting off the ground.

You can think of something similar to Kickstarter or IndieGoGo, but specific to WordPress projects.

We’re talking about providing the means for developers, designers, writers, etc, the means to work on projects that enhance the WordPress community.

This will not only be for themes and plugins; it will be for all WordPress projects, whether they be contributing to WordPress core, writing WordPress documentation for the codex or handbooks, writing new plugins, etc. For example, fund Developer Y to take a week off from his full time job and contribute to WordPress core. Or, fund Developer J to devote 20 hours out of her normal work week to improving the WordPress codex. Another example would be to fund Business X to produce an in-depth WordPress development course on a specific topic, perhaps advanced plugin development.

The entire idea is to better improve the entire WordPress ecosystem, whether that be WordPress core, plugins/themes on WordPress.org, the WordPress codex, tutorials hosted on individual’s sites, WordPress events, etc.

This will include both free and commercial projects, but a large emphasis will be placed on projects that contribute to the betterment of the WordPress community.

There are a large number of individuals and companies that would love to contribute back to WordPress core more, but are simply unable to because of the need to feed their families and keep the lights on.

We will be most interested in helping the projects that clearly need monetary assistance, but all projects will be considered.

This project has no intentions of making money for myself or anyone else involved. The entire purpose of it is to enable those that wish to give back more than they are currently able.

One of the potentials for this project that really excites me, is to make it easier for groups to put on non-officially sponsored WordPress events, such as Pressnomics. I know that I personally would happy to help contribute to the organization and funding of developer-specific WordPress events, or events specific for theme designers. Imagine how valuable a WordPress “camp” that focused purely on beginning WordPress development would be for aspiring developers? Or how about a WordPress event that focused on introducing people to the various ways of contributing to WordPress core?

There is not an expected launch date yet, but I’d expect it to go live sometime within the next month or two.

If you’d like to read more about the discussion that went into the project, check out the entire chat log from our IRC meetup a few days ago.

We have a coming soon page up at WP Fund It where you can signup to get email notifications about the project’s progression.