Guide: Contributor Introduction (Start Here!)

Welcome to MousePaw Media! We’re so excited you’ve chosen to volunteer your time and skills to help make our projects awesome.

This tutorial will help you get started as an open source contributor.

GitLab

Nearly all of our development work takes place on our GitLab, located at gitlab.mousepawmedia.com. Your MousePaw Media GitLab account also serves as your login for other parts of our development network.

  1. Log in or create an account now.

  2. Read through and sign the Community Rules, Terms of Development, and Terms of Use.

  3. You should now see the home page of our GitLab. Click your profile picture at the top of the sidebar, and click Edit Profile. Fill out as much as you wish, but especially the following. Make sure you click Update profile settings when you’re done.

    • Public avatar

    • Time zone

    • Full name

    • Pronouns

    • Public email

  4. Click Preferences on the left sidebar. Here, you may define the appearance and behavior of GitLab to match your preferences.

To learn more about how to use GitLab, check out their comprehensive documentation at GitLab Docs. You can acces this, as well as see the current version of GitLab we are running, by clicking Help in the lower-left corner of GitLab anytime.

Note

We are running the Free Self-Hosted tier of GitLab EE, so some features are not available to us. In the documentation, take note when a feature is indicated as being for the Premium or Ultimate tier or SaaS offering.

Discourse

Most of our collaboration takes place on Discourse. It is home to our community, as well as Q&A, project discussion, our issue tracker, and our software product specifications.

You can sign into Discourse at https://discourse.mousepawmedia.com using your MousePaw Media GitLab account.

Be sure to read the community rules by clicking the FAQ button from the left sidebar.

Reading and Posting

When you first go to Discourse, you’ll start on the Home screen. This displays all the categories, as well as the latest posts.

Click the “General” category, and then click the “Personal Introductions” topic. After reading as much as you want, click the Reply button at the bottom of the topic (not the one at the bottom of each post) to create your own post on the topic.

Important

Reply to the “Personal Introductions” topic with an introduction of yourself.

You can learn more about using Discourse from the “Discourse New User Guide” under the “General” category.

Important

Read “Discourse New User Guide”.

Issue Tracker

We are in the process of building our own issue tracker. In the meantime, Discourse is serving as our issue tracker, and will continue to be the staging area for community-reported issues.

You can view the issue tracker by visiting the “Issue Tracker” category, or by clicking Issue Tracker on the left sidebar.

If you’re looking for easy tasks to start with, look for ones that have been tagged with low Friction scores (f1 or f2) and low Relativity scores (r1 or r2). (You can learn more about Friction and Relativity from the Quantified Tasks website).

Getting Started with Development

You should start by setting up your Development Environment.

Each of our projects has a dedicated Git repository. You should create a dedicated folder on your computer for the repositories you clone. You can find each repository’s clone command on our GitLab. If you need help with cloning a repository, see Import Repositories.

After you have cloned a project repository, see its BUILDING.md file for instructions on how to build the code for the first time.

For help with working with these repositories and building code, see Guide: Building Code

Submitting the Code

Once you’re ready for the code to be reviewed, you should submit a Merge Request on the MousePaw Media GitLab. For more information on how to do this, see Guide: Code Contributions.