Podium is meant to be a beginner-friendly project to easily allow new contributors to jump right in and get their hands dirty. If you have problems with getting set up or running the project please submit an issue.
If you're fairly new to Django and haven't already done it, we highly recommend going through the official Django Tutorial before anything else.
If you've never attempted to contribute to an open-source project on Github before, please review Github's guides on the general Github Flow and how to create Pull Requests. Github Flow Forking a project
Once you're familiar with Django and the basic workflow, check out the issue tracker and look for issues flagged for beginners to find something to work on.
If you're very new to contributing to a project on Github, please refer to our Beginner's Guide
We always welcome additional documentation that helps clarify the project, code structure, etc. reStructuredText is the preferred format for documentation so that tools like Sphinx or Read The Docs can be easily used to publish documentation. Please review your documentation for spelling or grammar mistakes before submitting.
Please submit an issue on Github if you find any bugs in the project itself or any of the developer setup steps. Even if you are going to submit a Pull Request immediately to fix the issue, submitting an issue first helps us to track past bugs and fixes, and helps us know what we need to review.
In order for the project to remain easy for anyone to use, run, and contribute to, we request that any Pull Requests submitted follow a basic set of coding guidelines. All code submitted should:
- Conform to Python PEP8 style standards (https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/).It's recommended to use a tool like [pep8] or [flake8] to automatically check your code before committing, if your editor doesn't do this for you.
- Conform to the Django style guidelines for Django-specific code: (https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/internals/contributing/writing-code/coding-style/)
- Pass all existing tests. Just run
python manage.py testbefore committing. - Add tests if it adds features, removes features, or fixes a bug. It's especially nice to have tests that validate that a reported bug has been fixed.
- Be submitted in small, concise commits. This makes it much easier for maintainers to review your code more quickly and thus get your contributions merged more quickly.
- Have meaningful, well-formatted commit messages. This blog post provides a great guide to commit messages: (https://chris.beams.io/posts/git-commit/)
While these guidelines may seem strict in some regards, they make it very easy for anyone to jump into the project without having to spend time interpreting a variety of coding styles, odd spacing, etc.