First off, thank you for considering contributing to Learner. It's people like you that can make Learner a really great tool for schools.
Following these guidelines helps to communicate that you respect the time of the developers managing and developing this open source project. In return, they should reciprocate that respect in addressing your issue, assessing changes, and helping you finalize your pull requests.
Remember not to make spam PRs and contribute only if you are genuinely interested in the project.
Improving documentation, bug triaging, or writing tutorials are all examples of helpful contributions that we need.
Learner is an open source tool and we are looking for any new features that you think may be useful for students in a school environment. Feel free to also suggest changes on the overall UI of the project Do suggest ideas that you think can make this project a lot more easier, both for schools and for students, to adopt and start using as quickly as possible.
This includes not just how to communicate with others (being respectful, considerate, etc) but also technical responsibilities (importance of testing, project dependencies, etc).
Responsibilities
- Ensure cross-platform compatibility for every change that's accepted. Windows, Mac, Debian & Ubuntu Linux.
- Ensure that any UI changes that you make to the web platform is well designed to be responsive for all screen sizes (preferabely phones and PCs)
- Create issues for any major changes and enhancements that you wish to make. Discuss things transparently and get community feedback.
- Don't add any classes to the codebase unless absolutely needed. Err on the side of using functions.
- Keep feature versions as small as possible, preferably one new feature per version.
- Be welcoming to newcomers and encourage diverse new contributors from all backgrounds. See the Python Community Code of Conduct.
Unsure where to begin contributing to Learner? You can start by looking through these beginner and help-wanted issues: Beginner issues - issues which should only require a few lines of code, and a test or two. Help wanted issues - issues which should be a bit more involved than beginner issues. Both issue lists are sorted by total number of comments. While not perfect, number of comments is a reasonable proxy for impact a given change will have.
Here are a couple of friendly tutorials to get you started: http://makeapullrequest.com/ and http://www.firsttimersonly.com/
Working on your first Pull Request? You can learn how from this free series, How to Contribute to an Open Source Project on GitHub.
Learn the Python language basics here
At this point, you're ready to make your changes! Feel free to ask for help; everyone is a beginner at first 😸:
If a maintainer asks you to "rebase" your PR, they're saying that a lot of code has changed, and that you need to update your branch so it's easier to merge.
For something that is bigger than a one or two line fix:
- Create your own fork of the code
- Do the changes in your fork
- If you like the change and think the project could use it: * Be sure you have followed the code style for the project. * Send a pull request.
Small contributions such as fixing spelling errors, where the content is small enough to not be considered intellectual property, can be submitted by a contributor as a patch.
As a rule of thumb, changes are obvious fixes if they do not introduce any new functionality or creative thinking. As long as the change does not affect functionality, some likely examples include the following:
- Spelling / grammar fixes
- Typo correction, white space and formatting changes
- Comment clean up
- Bug fixes that change default return values or error codes stored in constants
- Adding logging messages or debugging output
- Changes to ‘metadata’ files like Gemfile, .gitignore, build scripts, etc.
- Moving source files from one directory or package to another
If you find a security vulnerability, do NOT open an issue. Email memerpg10@gmail.com instead.
Any security issues should also be submitted directly to memerpg10@gmail.com In order to determine whether you are dealing with a security issue, ask yourself these two questions:
- Can I access something that's not mine, or something I shouldn't have access to?
- Can I disable something for other people?
If the answer to either of those two questions are "yes", then you're probably dealing with a security issue. Note that even if you answer "no" to both questions, you may still be dealing with a security issue, so if you're unsure, just email us at memerpg10@gmail.com
When filing an issue, make sure to answer these five questions:
- What version of Python are you using (Python version)?
- What operating system and processor architecture are you using?
- What did you do?
- What did you expect to see?
- What did you see instead?
Our philosophy is to provide a snappy and powerful Learning Management Systems with no bugs to help schools coordinate their education strategy.
Currently Learner can do most of the basic tasks expected from an LMS like sharing of course resources, adding/deleting courses, etc, but we need a lot many user-friendly features in order to make Learner a software that schools will actually adopt.
If you find yourself wishing for a feature that doesn't exist in Learner, you are probably not alone. There are bound to be others out there with similar needs. Many of the features that Learner has today have been added because our users saw the need. Open an issue on our issues list on GitHub which describes the feature you would like to see, why you need it, and how it should work.
The core team (me and some of my fellow coders) looks at Pull Requests on a regular basis. After feedback has been given we expect responses within four weeks. After four weeks we may close the pull request if it isn't showing any activity.