Contributing to XOD
XOD is open-source software. Any help that makes the project better would be appreciated. You can contribute in many ways and even without writing a single line of code. The opportunities are summarized below.
Thumbs up #
Show your attitude to planned changes, feature requests, ideas, and critics with a single click. Explore issues in the GitHub repo and posts on the XOD forum, add 👍👎❤️ as you go to let us know a topic is significant. If we see a proposal is important to the community, we can raise its priority and deliver it quicker. Don’t be shy to use negative reactions: they help to make us correct decisions.
The love powers XOD team. So, if you want to give us a bit of motivation, star the XOD repository on GitHub.
Talk on the forum #
XOD forum is the central place where newcomers ask for assistance, and mature xoders come with feature requests and other proposals. Be a part of the discussion. The more xoders share their experience and thoughts, the better product we can make.
Report bugs #
If some behavior is definitely a bug and not a feature, help to hunt it down by reporting the exact steps so that anyone can reproduce the problem.
Try to narrow down your scenario to a minimal working/failing example. That is, if you have a big program causing a problem, start with deleting parts not relevant to the issue and observing the result: is the problem still there? Repeat until you get the most straightforward sequence of steps to reproduce the problem without any noise surrounding it.
You may report the bug on the forum or as a GitHub issue. The latter is much more preferable since the issues on GitHub are the tasks for core developers and forum posts are yet to be converted into issues. By making the report directly on GitHub you save our time, and we can fix the problem quicker.
Use the template which you see when you’re filing an issue to provide as many details as possible.
Fix the grammar #
XOD core developers are not native English speakers. So, we commit grammar mistakes, typos, and sometimes have poor wording. Hey, grammar nazi, help XOD to fulfill your expectations.
Phrases you see in the XOD IDE are embedded somewhere in the XOD source code which is open and available on GitHub. You can edit a file and send us a pull request within GitHub web interface without installing anything:
- Enter the term you would like to change in the GitHub repository search to find and open a file with the mistake.
- Edit, commit, pull request.
If you’d like to review a bunch of UI phrases at once, many of them are spread over message.js files. Feel free to edit.
When a mistake is on a documentation page the way to edit is the same. And as a convenience feature, you can click the “Edit this page” button located on the top of any page to jump directly into the required source file.
Blog and share #
The bigger the community, the more vibrant XOD ecosystem.
Do your friends and colleagues know about XOD? A short note or repost on Twitter, a blog, or another medium will help to spread the word and give the language a stronger foundation.
If you have completed some device, project, video, or article using XOD, wow! Promptly share it on the forum in Look what I’ve done category. We share the interesting parts further.
Offline events are another cup of tea. Would you like to speak at a conference, meet-up, or a workshop? Tell us if we can support you anyway with hardware or media: write a message on hello@xod.io.
Make libraries #
If you’ve spent some time tinkering with XOD, the chances you’ve done something useful are high. Don’t hesitate to extract useful nodes into a library and publish it on the cloud so that others can base their projects on your work.
Don’t forget to share your cake on the forum in Look what I’ve done category.
Improve the docs #
If you feel the documentation is incomplete, unclear, or even misguiding at some points, help XOD to improve it. Add sections, rewrite paragraphs, provide examples, enhance style as you wish, and send us a pull request. The process is the same as for fixing the grammar.
Translate the docs #
Not everyone is comfortable with English. You can help international users by providing translated versions for documentation articles.
Any original article is contained in a README.md file somewhere under the /docs/ directory in the xod-docs repository. To provide a translation, create a new file next to the README.md with the name reflecting the target language (DE.md, IT.md, PT.md, FR.md, ES.md, RU.md, JA.md, KO.md, CN.md) and send us a pull request.
Contribute to code #
If you feel the power, you may try contributing to the core code. Follow the guidelines described in the CONTRIBUTING.md in the GitHub repo and choose one of the issues to work on.
The best candidates to start with are:
Post a comment to an issue thread if you would like to take it on. We can provide more details and respond to technical questions. Others will see the traction.