Now that Elgg is hosted on GitHub, it’s even easier to start contributing fixes to the project. Let’s walk through the easy way, where you don’t need to learn how to really use git.
Suppose you want to submit a patch to the .htaccess file.
Sign up for GitHub
(jump on it)
- https://github.com/signup/free
- Enter Username, Email Address, Password, (ignore the SSH Public Key field)
- Click “I agree, sign me up!”
Fork the Elgg repository
(become a committer of your very own copy of Elgg)
- http://github.com/Elgg/Elgg
- Click “Fork”
Modify your fork through the GitHub web interface
(commit your change without knowing git)
- http://github.com/{your-username}/Elgg
- Click on file you want to modify (in this case, htaccess_dist)
- When you’re viewing the contents of the file you want to change, click the “edit” link (top right)
- Make changes to the file in the editor
- Enter a Commit Message to summarize the changes you’ve made and why you’ve made them.
Submit a Pull Request
(tell the Elgg team why your change rocks)
- http://github.com/{your-username}/Elgg/blob/{id-of-commit}/htaccess_dist
- Click “Pull Request”
- Enter a Message that will go with your commit to be reviewed by core committers
- Click “Send Pull Request”
Add a link to your commit to the ticket in Trac
(tell everyone you’re on the case)
- http://trac.elgg.org/ticket/3282#comment:8
- Add a comment that includes a hyperlink to the url of your commit from Step 4
You’re done!
This is a great way to help out Elgg by fixing minor, single-file errors (like typos). If you need to change multiple files as part of one commit, the web interface will not be the way to go. In that case you’ll want to learn a little more about GitHub and git. You can start here:
- Learn GitHub:
- Learn Git:
- Git Tools:
(This post adapted from Richard Worth's post for jQuery UI)
