Contributing to Commento

Introduction

Thank you for choosing to contribute to Commento. There are, however, certain guidelines we'd like for the contributors to follow. If you're a newcomer to open source and you haven't contributed to other projects or used Git before, you should make yourself familiar before proceeding; there are tons of tutorials to get started with Git.

How do I start contributing?

• First, set up the environment required to compile and build the project.

• Then, you should fork the project and clone your fork locally. You will be using your fork for all development. It's generally a good practice to not make any changes on the master branch; instead create a branch for each merge request.

• Following this, you should compile the project from source and make sure everything is working as intended. Run the tests to double-check.

• Next, you should review the development guidelines; code standards (commit messages are code too) are important if you plan on reading what you've written on a different day.

• After you've read the guidelines, you pick and work on the contribution you want to make. This can be a bug fix, a new feature, a performance improvement, or a code standards improvement, or even a typo. If you need inspiration, pick an issue from our public issue tracker.

• When you're satisfied with your work (and when you're sure you've adhered to the guidelines), you can make a Merge Request (MR).

I've made a mess of it

In the words of Linus Torvalds, that's okay, we all do. Join #commento on Freenode and we'll help you out. Make sure you've read the documentation beforehand.

Free Commento.io access

Commento.io is the hosted, cloud version of Commento. The service costs me money to host and maintain; as a result, normally, you have to pay a monthly subscription fee.

Commento is an open source project and it would not exist without its contributors. As a thank you, I'm very happy to offer free, perpetual Commento.io access in exchange for non-trivial patches. Once your merge request has been accepted and merged, email me to apply the waiver to your account. What's trivial and what's non-trivial is entirely at my discretion; please don't abuse this.