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1.2.
Contributing
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Like all open source products, Plone only moves forward on the contributions of volunteers. If you would like to contribute, we will be incredibly happy!
However, there are many people and companies who rely on Plone day-to-day, so we have to introduce some degree of quality control over the code base. Plone's source code is hosted in an open Subversion respository on http://svn.plone.org, but only members of the developer team have commit-rights. Before you can get commit rights, three things need to happen:
- You must familiarise yourself a little with the community. Get on the chatroom, start asking and (especially) answering questions on the mailing lists, and get to know the more active developers a bit. If you arrive in the #plone chatroom and ask how you can help, chances are you will be met with gratitude and openness, so don't be afraid to introduce yourself. If no-one answers, it's probably just a bad time of the day: try the developers' list instead.
- You must prove that your code does not suck. There are two types of people in the world - those who can write code, and those who cannot. Actually, we take that back - there are also UI people. And accessibility experts. And translators. And documentation writers. And testers. However you wish to contribute, though, we'd like to see the calibre of what you produce. See below for ways of contributing without commit-access to the source code repository.
- You must sign the contributor agreement. This offers some intellectual copyright protection, and ensures that the Plone Foundation is able to exercise some control over the codebase to ensure it is not appropriated for someone's unethical purposes. Think IBM vs. SCO.
Now, there are a number of other ways you can help out, which do not require contributor agreements or anything else than the right attitude.
Testing
We always need more testers. If you believe you have found a bug in Plone, particularly if you are using a less common operating system, have a very large site, or operate in non-English locales, please report it in the bug collector. Please search the tracker thoroughly before submitting a bug, so that we avoid duplicates.
Before submitting a bug, please log in with your plone.org username. If you don't have an account, just click the "join" link in the blue bar at the top on plone.org. You can submit bugs without being logged in, but when you are logged in, you will be given email notification when your bug is responded to. This is important if we need clarification, for example - you can see a request for clarification, and then add a follow-up with more details.
Please think carefully before submitting a bug. If the bug is really in a third party product, do not use the Plone tracker, as we won't be able to help you - contact the authors directly, instead, or use their tracker in the products area. If it is a Plone bug, search for similar issues and add a follow-up to an existing bug if necessary - we will be notified of this just as clearly as with new bugs.
If you have to submit a new bug, try to write as clearly and concisely as you can to ensure that we understand your problem. Include relevant product versions, and always enter your Plone and Zope versions. Be honest about the severity - submitting a bug as "critical" if it is not is unlikely to win you any sympathy.
Patches and verification
Very often, issues end up in the collector for a long time because we don't know whether there was actually a problem, or if the submitter was experiencing a local configuration issue. If a bug looks sketchy, it's very helpful if you can try to replicate the problem on your own setup and add a follow-up about your experiences. If you have more insight to offer than original submitter, this is of course incredibly useful!
If you think you know how to fix a bug, this is your chance to shine. Once logged in, you can submit patches to the tracker. Even if you can't provide a patch, but can do some research and come up with a way in which the issue may be resolved easily, this will help the developers immensely. Adding patches to the collector is one of the best ways of showing off your skills and proving that you should be given commit-access to the Plone repository.
Documentation
Any member of plone.org (that includes you, if you want to be) can submit documentation to the Plone documentation area. If you have discovered something that you feel was poorly documented, you will gain much praise by writing a short How-to or a Tutorial on the subject. Once you are finished, submit your document for review, and we will publish it if it is not giving bad advice or too difficult to understand. You will probably find that writing documentation also helps you structure your own understanding of Plone, and forces you to consider issues you may have otherwise glossed over.
If you need help with writing documentation, or you're not sure where to start, send a mail to the plone-docs list/newsgroup
Helping others
The best way to gain respect in the community is by helping others. If you spend some time in the #plone chatroom or on the Plone users' mailing list answering people's questions when you know the answer, people will take notice. Helping others will help your own understanding, not to mention the warm fuzzy feeling you'll get afterwards.
