Guidance regarding contribution to Joomla!

[Shivam Luthra]

Hi everybody,

I am Shivam Luthra, a 2nd year Computer Science & Engineering undergraduate from India and looking forward to contribute in Open-Source. I fortunately found Joomla! as my part of interest and wanted to contribute in it. I am presently working out on web-development skills like HTML 5, CSS 3, bootstrap, Javascript, Jquery, PHP and Mysql.

I have also gone through Joomla! GSOC-16 projects and would be privileged to work among this community.

So, can anyone please guide me how to start things from scratch? I assure giving my best to make the things workout!

Regards,
Shivam Luthra

[ssnobben]

Great that you want to help the Joomla community. As far as I know there is info on Joomla.org --> https://www.joomla.org/contribute-to-joomla.html and maybe some people here can can also add some extra info about how to code contribute in different aspects.

Q: Did you find it difficult to find info on how to contribute to Joomla and why if so?

[Allon Moritz]

It is always a good idea to start testing pull requests https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/pulls to get you a feeling about the development process.

[Anibal]

Hi Shivam,

It depends on your time and what you want to do.

• Testing issues is a great way to start slowly and better know the general development process. 
  
• After testing, you can start submitting PRs to fix issues.
• You can also help submitting new feature or helping to implement them. For instance, the new router and custom fields are coming, and help is needed to test them.
• When you are ready for more, you can join forces to one of the Volunteer teams: https://volunteers.joomla.org/teams

On the other hand, volunters are always needed to run the operation. To give you a concrete case, I'm a member of JED team and we are always looking for support specialists or site developers. In this case, we collaborate with the extensions directory. Feel free to apply ;-) https://extensions.joomla.org/blog/item/fun-in-jed-bug-smashing-and-feature-development

Best regards,

Anibal

[Shivam Luthra]

@ssnobben No it's quite easy and it's been quite helpful too :) Thanks!

[Shivam Luthra]

Thanks as well ! Allon Moritz :)

[Walt Sorensen aka photodude]

Depends on how you want to contribute. 

As everyone else has said, Testers for PRs are always needed. Currently, there are about 301 open PR's. Of those only about 31 have received testing and the RTC tag for successful tests.

There are also about 202 open issues not addressed by a PR yet. so if you have the knowhow and time to figure out how to fix things, that is also needed. 

Testing Instructions
https://docs.joomla.org/Testing_Joomla!_patches

Reading and cleaning up the Documentation is always a big project and is a good place to learn from and help.

You can always find more opportunities help on the volunteers site
https://volunteers.joomla.org/

PR = pull request, these are proposed code fixes
RTC = Ready to commit, these are patches that have been tested and could make it into a future version.

I'm currently asking for help in completing and validating the Code Standards implementation with PHPCS 2.7.x so developers can have access to the code style autofixers. https://github.com/joomla/coding-standards/pull/109

Additionally, there is lots of activity and help needed in Testing Joomla! 3.6.3 RC3 for release, completing the 3.7 and 4.0 versions of Joomla. We also have need for people to help with adding support for PHP7.1 and HHVM.

There is also a mailing group specific to the CMS development https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/joomla-dev-cms

With that being said, welcome to the community; and thanks for being willing to contribute.