Contributing

Contributions are welcome, and they are greatly appreciated! Every little bit helps, and credit will always be given.

You can contribute in many ways:

Types of Contributions

Report Bugs

MANTIS encompasses a number of components. For the following base components, please report issues at the central issue tracker for the whole Django MANTIS framework at https://github.com/siemens/django-mantis/issues :

If you are reporting a bug, please include:

  • Your operating system name and version.
  • Any details about your local setup that might be helpful in troubleshooting.
  • Detailed steps to reproduce the bug.

Fix Bugs

Look through the GitHub issues for bugs. Anything tagged with “bug” is open to whoever wants to implement it.

Implement Features

Look through the GitHub issues for features. Anything tagged with “feature” is open to whoever wants to implement it.

Write Documentation

Djangos could always use more documentation, whether as part of the official Djangos docs, in docstrings, or even on the web in blog posts, articles, and such.

Submit Feedback

The best way to send feedback is to file an issue at https://github.com/siemens/django-mantis/issues.

If you are proposing a feature:

  • Explain in detail how it would work.
  • Keep the scope as narrow as possible, to make it easier to implement.
  • Remember that this is a volunteer-driven project, and that contributions are welcome :)

Get Started!

In your contribution, you may want to either modify/add to existing code or create a new Django application that interacts with the existing applications that are part of the Mantis framework.

MANTIS profitted a lot from the advice provided in Two Scoops of Django. Unless you are an absolute Django expert (and maybe even then), please read Daniel Greenfield’s and Audrey Roy’s excellent Two Scoops of Django. Even though it provides best practices for Django 1.5, most of its advice is also valid for Django 1.6, and likely to be very relevant for quite a few minor revisions to come.

Modifying/adding to existing code

Here’s how to set up a repository for local development.

  1. Fork the relevant repository repo on GitHub.

  2. Clone your fork locally:

    $ git clone git@github.com:your_name_here/<repository>.git
    
  3. Install your local copy into a virtualenv. Assuming you have virtualenvwrapper installed, this is how you set up your fork for local development:

    $ mkvirtualenv <your_mantis_environment>
    $ cd <repository_folder>
    $ python setup.py develop
    
  4. Create a branch for local development:

    $ git checkout -b name-of-your-bugfix-or-feature
    

Now you can make your changes locally.

  1. Commit your changes and push your branch to GitHub:

    $ git add .
    $ git commit -m "Your detailed description of your changes."
    $ git push origin name-of-your-bugfix-or-feature
    
  2. Submit a pull request through the GitHub website.

Writing your own Django application

Do yourself a favor and set up the directory structure of your Django application in the right way from the very start. The easiest way to do so is to use Daniel Greenfield’s cookiecutter-djangopackage template (which uses Audrey Roy’s excellent Cookiecutter for creating the directories): this layout has a very sensible directory structure with out-of-the-box configuration of setup.py for easy build, submission to PyPi, etc., as well as the start of a Sphinx documentation tree. Once you have the directory structure created, initialize a fresh git repository with it and get to work...

Pull Request Guidelines

Before you submit a pull request, check that it meets these guidelines:

  1. The pull request should include tests.
  2. If the pull request adds functionality, the docs should be updated. Put your new functionality into a function with a docstring, and add the feature to the list in README.rst.
  3. The pull request should work for Python 2.7.