👍🎉 First off, thanks for taking the time to contribute! 🎉👍
These contribution guidelines are mostly just that - guidelines, not rules. This is what we've found to work best over the years, but if you choose to ignore them, we still love you! 💖 Use your best judgement, and feel free to propose changes to this document in a pull request.
This document covers contributing to the codebase of the CMS but the community site has plenty of inspiration for other ways to get involved.
If you don't feel you'd like to make code changes here, you can visit our documentation repository and use your experience to contribute to making the docs we have, even better.
We also encourage community members to feel free to comment on others' pull requests and issues - the expertise we have is not limited to the Core Collaborators and HQ. So, if you see something on the issue tracker or pull requests you feel you can add to, please don't be shy.
- Before you start
- Finding your first issue: Up for grabs
- Making your changes
- Creating a pull request
- The review process
This project and everyone participating in it, is governed by the our Code of Conduct.
We categorise pull requests (PRs) into two categories:
| PR type | Definition |
|---|---|
| Small PRs | Bug fixes and small improvements - can be recognized by seeing a small number of changes and possibly a small number of new files. |
| Large PRs | New features and large refactorings - can be recognized by seeing a large number of changes, plenty of new files, updates to package manager files (NuGet’s packages.config, NPM’s packages.json, etc.). |
We’re usually able to handle small PRs pretty quickly. A community volunteer will do the initial review and flag it for Umbraco HQ as “community tested”. If everything looks good, it will be merged pretty quickly as per the described process.
We would love to follow the same process for larger PRs but this is not always possible due to time limitations and priorities that need to be aligned. We don’t want to put up any barriers, but this document should set the correct expectations.
Not all changes are wanted, so on occasion we might close a PR without merging it but if we do, we will give you feedback why we can't accept your changes. So make sure to talk to us before making large changes, so we can ensure that you don't put all your hard work into something we would not be able to merge.
Please make sure to describe your larger ideas in an issue (bugs) or discussion (new features), it helps to put in mock up screenshots or videos. If the change makes sense for HQ to include in Umbraco CMS we will leave you some feedback on how we’d like to see it being implemented.
If a larger pull request is encouraged by Umbraco HQ, the process will be similar to what is described in the small PRs process above, we strive to feedback within 14 days. Finalizing and merging the PR might take longer though as it will likely need to be picked up by the development team to make sure everything is in order. We’ll keep you posted on the progress.
If you're unsure about whether your changes belong in the core Umbraco CMS or if you should turn your idea into a package instead, make sure to talk to us.
If it doesn’t fit in CMS right now, we will likely encourage you to make it into a package instead. A package is a great way to check out popularity of a feature, learn how people use it, validate good usability and fix bugs. Eventually, a package could "graduate" to be included in the CMS.
While most changes are welcome, there are certain types of changes that are discouraged and might get your pull request refused. Of course this will depend heavily on the specific change, but please take the following examples in mind.
- Breaking changes (code and/or behavioral) 💥 - sometimes it can be a bit hard to know if a change is breaking or not. Fortunately, if it relates to code, the build will fail and warn you.
- Large refactors 🤯 - the larger the refactor, the larger the probability of introducing new bugs/issues.
- Changes to obsolete code and/or property editors ✍️
- Adding new config options 🦾 - while having more flexibility is (most of the times) better, having too many options can also become overwhelming/confusing, especially if there are other (good/simple) ways to achieve it.
- Whitespace changes 🫥 - while some of our files might not follow the formatting/whitespace rules (mostly old ones), changing several of them in one go would cause major merge conflicts with open pull requests or other work in progress. Do feel free to fix these when you are working on another issue/feature and end up "touching" those files!
- Adding new extension/helper methods ✋ - keep in mind that more code also means more to maintain, so if a helper is only meaningful for a few, it might not be worth adding it to the core.
While these are only a few examples, it is important to ask yourself these questions before making a pull request:
- How many will benefit from this change?
- Are there other ways to achieve this? And if so, how do they compare?
- How maintainable is the change?
- What would be the effort to test it properly?
- Do the benefits outweigh the risks?
It is your responsibility to make sure that you're allowed to share the code you're providing us. For example, you should have permission from your employer or customer to share code.
Similarly, if your contribution is copied or adapted from somewhere else, make sure that the license allows you to reuse that for a contribution to Umbraco-CMS.
If you're not sure, leave a note on your contribution and we will be happy to guide you.
When your contribution has been accepted, it will be MIT licensed from that time onwards.
Umbraco HQ will regularly mark newly created issues on the issue tracker with the community/up-for-grabs tag. This means that the proposed changes are wanted in Umbraco but the HQ does not have the time to make them at this time. We encourage anyone to pick them up and help out.
If you do start working on something, make sure to leave a small comment on the issue saying something like: "I'm working on this". That way other people stumbling upon the issue know they don't need to pick it up, someone already has.
Great question! The short version goes like this:
-
Fork
Create a fork of
Umbraco-CMSon GitHub
-
Clone
When GitHub has created your fork, you can clone it in your favorite Git tool
-
Switch to the correct branch
Switch to the
contribbranch -
Build
Build your fork of Umbraco locally as described in the build documentation: you can debug with Visual Studio Code or with Visual Studio.
-
Branch
Create a new branch now and name it after the issue you're fixing, we usually follow the format:
temp-12345. This means it's a temporary branch for the particular issue you're working on, in this case issue number12345. Don't commit tocontrib, create a new branch first. -
Change
Make your changes, experiment, have fun, explore and learn, and don't be afraid. We welcome all contributions and will happily give feedback.
-
Commit and push
Done? Yay! 🎉
Remember to commit to your new
tempbranch, and don't commit tocontrib. Then you can push the changes up to your fork on GitHub.
Once you've already got a fork and cloned your fork locally, you can skip steps 1 and 2 going forward. Just remember to keep your fork up to date before making further changes.
To sync your fork with this original one, you'll have to add the upstream url. You only have to do this once:
git remote add upstream https://github.com/umbraco/Umbraco-CMS.git
Then when you want to get the changes from the main repository:
git fetch upstream
git rebase upstream/contrib
In this command we're syncing with the contrib branch, but you can of course choose another one if needed.
More information on how this works can be found on the thoughtbot blog.
To be honest, we don't like rules very much. We trust you have the best of intentions and we encourage you to create working code. If it doesn't look perfect then we'll happily help clean it up.
That said, the Umbraco development team likes to follow the hints that ReSharper gives us (no problem if you don't have this installed) and we've added a .editorconfig file so that Visual Studio knows what to do with whitespace, line endings, etc.
You can get in touch with the core contributors team in multiple ways; we love open conversations and we are a friendly bunch. No question you have is stupid. Any question you have usually helps out multiple people with the same question. Ask away:
- If there's an existing issue on the issue tracker then that's a good place to leave questions and discuss how to start or move forward.
- If you want to ask questions on some code you've already written you can create a draft pull request, detailed in a GitHub blog post.
- Unsure where to start? Did something not work as expected? Try leaving a note in the "Contributing to Umbraco" forum. The team monitors that one closely, so one of us will be on hand and ready to point you in the right direction.
Exciting! You're ready to show us your changes.
We recommend you to sync with our repository before you submit your pull request. That way, you can fix any potential merge conflicts and make our lives a little bit easier.
GitHub will have picked up on the new branch you've pushed and will offer to create a Pull Request. Click that green button and away you go.
We like to use git flow as much as possible, but don't worry if you are not familiar with it. The most important thing you need to know is that when you fork the Umbraco repository, the default branch is set to contrib. This is the branch you should be targeting.
Please note: we are no longer accepting features for v8 and below but will continue to merge security fixes as and when they arise.
You've sent us your first contribution - congratulations! Now what?
The Core Collaborators team can now start reviewing your proposed changes and give you feedback on them. If it's not perfect, we'll either fix up what we need or we can request that you make some additional changes.
You will get an initial automated reply from our Friendly Umbraco Robot, Umbrabot, to acknowledge that we’ve seen your PR and we’ll pick it up as soon as we can. You can take this opportunity to double check everything is in order based off the handy checklist Umbrabot provides.
You will get feedback as soon as the Core Collaborators team can after opening the PR. You’ll most likely get feedback within a couple of weeks. Then there are a few possible outcomes:
- Your proposed change is awesome! We merge it in and it will be included in the next minor release of Umbraco
- If the change is a high priority bug fix, we will cherry-pick it into the next patch release as well so that we can release it as soon as possible
- Your proposed change is awesome but needs a bit more work, we’ll give you feedback on the changes we’d like to see
- Your proposed change is awesome but... not something we’re looking to include at this point. We’ll close your PR and the related issue (we’ll be nice about it!). See making larger changes and pull request or package?
If you make the corrections we ask for in the same branch and push them to your fork again, the pull request automatically updates with the additional commit(s) so we can review it again. If all is well, we'll merge the code and your commits are forever part of Umbraco!
We understand you have other things to do and can't just drop everything to help us out.
So if we’re asking for your help to improve the PR we’ll wait for two weeks to give you a fair chance to make changes. We’ll ask for an update if we don’t hear back from you after that time.
If we don’t hear back from you for 4 weeks, we’ll close the PR so that it doesn’t just hang around forever. You’re very welcome to re-open it once you have some more time to spend on it.
There will be times that we really like your proposed changes and we’ll finish the final improvements we’d like to see ourselves. You still get the credits and your commits will live on in the git repository.
The Core Contributors team consists of one member of Umbraco HQ, Sebastiaan, who gets assistance from the following community members who have committed to volunteering their free time:
These wonderful people aim to provide you with a reply to your PR, review and test out your changes and on occasions, they might ask more questions. If they are happy with your work, they'll let Umbraco HQ know by approving the PR. HQ will have final sign-off and will check the work again before it is merged.