Contributing to Metamaps

Active involvement from the community is essential to help make Metamaps as beneficial for communities as it can be. You can help by reporting bugs, fixing bugs, adding features, contributing new modules and by providing feedback.

Reporting bugs and other issues

If you think you've encountered a bug, do the following:

Make sure you are working with the latest version of the Metamaps develop branch.
Browse through the issues to check if anyone else has already reported. If someone has, feel free to add more information to that issue to help us solve it.
If no one has yet submitted the issue you are encountering, add it in! Please be sure to include as much information as possible, include errors, warnings, screenshots, links to a video showing the problem or code that can reproduce the issue.

Contributing code

Metamaps is made possible by open source contributors like you. We're very interested in getting help from the greater community, but before you start it's important that you become acquainted with our workflow. Following these guidelines below will make collaboration much smoother and increase the chances that we will accept your pull request without hiccups.

Development Process

Our development process is very similar to the approach described in the well-known article A Successful Git Branching Model by Vincent Driessen . Here's an overview:

The master branch is the current base for our deployed instances. This branch must remain stable and always work.
The develop branch is the current state of development. Metamaps developers base their work on this branch. It is not guaranteed to be stable.
All code must be reviewed before being committed to develop or master. This means all commits should take place on your own personal branch, and submitted via a Github pull request when ready.
Only maintainers can accept pull requests from forks into the core Metamaps.cc repository.

Getting started

Make sure you have a GitHub account
Fork metamaps
Keep your fork up to date. Metamaps is a fast moving project, and things are changing all the time. It's important that any changes you make are based on the most recent version of metamaps, since it's possible that something may have changed that breaks your pull request or invalidates it.
Make sure you have a Contributor License Agreement on file.
Read on ...

Contributor License Agreement

Before we can accept any contributions to Metamaps, we first require that all individuals or companies agree to our Contributor License Agreement (CLA). The e-mail address used in the pull request will be used to check if a CLA has already been filed, so be sure to list all email addresses that you might use to submit your pull requests when filling it out. Our CLA can be found here.

Testing and Linting

Please run rspec in the Metamaps root directory before submitting your pull request.

Branch grouping tokens

All pull requests submitted to Metamaps.cc should occur on a new branch. For these branches, please use a short token indicating the nature of the branch in question followed by a / and then a very concise string describing the branch. This isn't a very important part of the workflow, but we are currently using the following branch prefixes:

fix      // bug fixes
wip      // work in progress (not suitable for a pull request)
instance // (internal) Tracks customizations made to metamaps instances
feature  // All other new features

Bug fixes

If you'd like to contribute a fix for a bug you've encountered, first read up on how to report a bug and report it so we are aware of the issue. By filing the issue first, we may be able to provide you with some insight that guides you in the right direction.

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