Thank you for wanting to contribute to developing USC Website! You can help in many different ways, be it improving documentation, submitting bug reports or feature requests, or writing code. Let's get started!
This guide is meant to be beginner-friendly, but there might still be things you don't understand at first. It's okay! Google is your senpai. Take your time and do some research! If you still have questions, feel free to approach us! We are very friendly don't worry heh.
Basic understanding of these tools that we use to develop the USC website would be useful to get you started.
- Git is the software we use for collaboration. Atlassian's Git Tutorials is a very resource. The Pro Git Book - particularly chapters 2 and 3 - is also a good read to navigate your way around.
- We use Javascript for the website so Mozilla's Javascript Guide is a good place to start to learn the language.
- Learning a bit of React would be helpful in making sense of the code too; you can start learning from the React Tutorial and React Docs!
As per the development instructions in the README.md, you should have installed Node.js version 10.13.0 or above and Yarn version 1.2.0 or above.
If you intend to make any non-trivial changes to the UI or implementation in any of the projects, we recommend first filing an issue. This lets us reach an agreement on your proposal before you put significant effort into it.
If you're only fixing a bug, it's fine to submit a pull request right away but we still recommend to file an issue detailing what you're fixing. This is helpful in case we don't accept that specific fix but want to keep track of the issue.
Here's a helpful video series to start learning how: How to Contribute to an Open Source Project on GitHub
If you decide to fix an issue, please be sure to check the comment thread, and whether it's been assigned to anybody yet, in case somebody is already working on a fix. If nobody is working on it at the moment, please leave a comment stating that you intend to work on it so other people don't accidentally duplicate your effort.
If somebody claims an issue but doesn't follow up for more than three weeks (school can make you very busy sigh), it's fine to take over it but you should still leave a comment to update.
The core team is monitoring for pull requests. We will review your pull request and either merge it, request changes to it, or close it with an explanation.
Before submitting a pull request, please make sure the following is done:
- Fork the repository and create your branch from
master. - Follow the development instructions to get your code running locally.
- Before pushing your changes, do a style check by using the command
npm run format
Add, push and commit your changes to the branch and you're done! Wait for one of the developers from the core team to review your changes.
If you have any questions, you may contact (on Telegram) Yee Jian (@swampertx)!