Becoming a valuable community member of SilverStripe is really easy: just read the How To Contribute section of the community pages, and if you are still unsure, suggest some ideas on the forum and have the community delegate tasks and work with you! There are all sorts of ways to help out, and not all of them require a deep understanding of complex programming. For instance, simply spreading the word is just as awesome as refactoring one of our core classes.

Recently we also started marking certain items in our bug tracker as 'easy'. This has been done deliberately to encourage new people to help with the SilverStripe project, and gain the confidence and understanding to move up to more complex tasks.