Contribute help documentation¶

Although we are working to make the interface easy to use, there are some complicated concepts in Crabgrass. By its very nature, there are some things which need a lot of explaining.

There are two types of help documentation we need:

• Tutorials: a narrative story about how to get something done.
• Reference: a quick reference that will be linked inline to a particular element of the user interface.

The help documentation is created under the group crabgrass.

Write a usage scenario¶

A usage scenario is a complete story about how someone might use crabgrass. These scenarios are then used to drive future development. At all times, we ask ourselves if changes to crabgrass are turning the hypothetical scenarios into reality.

Scenarios are created under the group users.

Request a new feature¶

If you have an idea on how to improve working functions or if you have an idea for a new function,
check the feature requests page, and post to the appropriate section.

To make feature requests useful for the developers, they should be accompanied by a usage scenario.

Feature requests are created under the group users.

Report a bug¶

Step 1 — make sure you have a new bug

1. Is the problem you are experiencing really a bug? Just because something is annoying or doesn’t work the way you would like doesn’t mean it is necessarily broken. For ideas about new features, see feature requests.
2. Has the bug already been verified? Check the known bugs page to see if the bug has already been documented.

Step 2 — add your bug to new bugs

If the bug in question is not in known bugs, add it to the new bugs wiki.

Step 3 — your bug is verified

Once confirmed by a second party, new bugs get moved to known bugs. From there, developers may move a known bug to one of several bug task lists. Once in a task list, a bug is in the queue to be fixed.

Step 4 — the bug is fixed

Once fixed, the bug is removed from the task list, removed from known bugs, and placed in fixed bugs.

Bug reports are created under the group users.

Attend a local crabgrass hacknight¶

• San Francisco: Every other Tuesday night.
• Santa Cruz: yet to be announced.

Check out the code and start hacking¶

Crabgrass is written in ruby on rails. For information on where to find good help documentation, write to elijah@riseup.net.

You can check out the code and follow the local development howto.

Once you are familiar with the code, you can request to join the crabgrass-dev group. This group is for people actively contributing code and templates to crabgrass.