Pico/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to Pico

Pico aims to be a high quality Content Management System (CMS) but at the same time wants to give contributors freedom when submitting fixes or improvements.

As such we want to encourage but not obligate you, the contributor, to follow these guidelines. The only exception to this are the guidelines elucidated in the Prevent merge-hell section.

Having said that: we really appreciate it when you apply the guidelines in part or wholly as that will save us time which, in turn, we can spend on bugfixes and new features.

Issues

If you want to report an issue with Pico's core, please create a new Issue on GitHub. Concerning problems with plugins or themes, please refer to the website of the developer of this plugin or theme.

Before creating a new Issue on GitHub, please make sure the problem wasn't reported yet using GitHubs search engine. Please describe your issue as clear as possible and always include steps to reproduce the problem.

This is an example of what information to include with your issue.

Version
- Operating System and version
- Pico Version
- other installed software, plugins, if applicable
- hardware information, if applicable

Bug Description
- A concise description of what the problem is.  Pure description, no narrative or conversational language.

Severity
- Trivial, Minor, Major, or Catastrophic

Steps to Reproduce
- Step by step instructions on how to reproduce this bug.
- Do not assume anything, the more detailed your list of instructions, the easier it is for the developer to track down the problem!

Actual Behavior
- Type what happens when you follow the instructions.  This is the manifestation of the bug.

Expected Behavior
- Type what you expected to happen when you followed the instructions.  
- This is important, because you may have misunderstood something or missed a step,
  and knowing what you expected to see will help the developer recognize that.

Troubleshooting/Testing Steps Attempted
- Describe anything you did to try to fix it on your own.

Workaround
- If you found a way to make the program work in spite of the bug, describe how you did it here.

Contributing code

Once you decide you want to contribute to Pico's core (which we really appreciate!) you can fork the project from https://github.com/picocms/Pico. If you're interested in developing a plugin or theme for Pico, please refer to the development section of our website.

Prevent merge-hell

Please do not develop your contribution on the master branch of your fork, but create a separate feature branch, that is based off the master branch, for each feature that you want to contribute.

Not doing so means that if you decide to work on two separate features and place a pull request for one of them, that the changes of the other issue that you are working on is also submitted. Even if it is not completely finished.

To get more information about the usage of Git, please refer to the Pro Git book written by Scott Chacon and/or this help page of GitHub.

Pull Requests

Please keep in mind that pull requests should be small (i.e. one feature per request), stick to existing coding conventions and documentation should be updated if required. It's encouraged to make commits of logical units and check for unnecessary whitespace before committing (try git diff --check). Please reference issue numbers in your commit messages where appropriate.

Coding Standards

Pico uses the PSR-2 Coding Standard as defined by the PHP Framework Interoperability Group (PHP-FIG).

For historical reasons we don't use formal namespaces. Markdown files in the content-sample folder (the inline documentation) must follow a hard limit of 80 characters line length.

It is recommended to check your code using PHP_CodeSniffer using the PSR2 standard using the following command:

$ ./bin/phpcs --standard=PSR2 [file(s)]

With this command you can specify a file or folder to limit which files it will check or omit that argument altogether, in which case the current directory is checked.

Keep documentation in sync

Pico accepts the problems of having redundant documentation on different places (concretely Pico's inline user docs, the README.md and the website) for the sake of a better user experience. When updating the docs, please make sure to keep them in sync.

If you update the README.md or content-sample/index.md, please make sure to update the corresponding files in the _docs folder of the gh-pages branch (i.e. Pico's website) and vice versa. Unfortunately this involves three (!) different markdown parsers. If you're experiencing problems, use Pico's erusev/parsedown-extra as a reference. You can try to make the contents compatible to Redcarpet by yourself, otherwise please address the issues in your pull request message and we'll take care of it.

Versioning

Pico follows Semantic Versioning 2.0 and uses version numbers like MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH. We will increment the:

• MAJOR version when we make incompatible API changes,
• MINOR version when we add functionality in a backwards-compatible manner, and
• PATCH version when we make backwards-compatible bug fixes.

For more information please refer to the http://semver.org website.

Branching

The master branch contains the current development version of Pico. It is likely unstable and not ready for production use.

However, the master branch always consists of a deployable (but not necessarily deployed) version of Pico. As soon as development of a new MAJOR or MINOR release starts, a separate branch (e.g. pico-1.1) is created and a pull request is opened to receive the desired feedback.

Pico's actual development happens in separate development branches. Development branches are prefixed by:

• feature/ for bigger features,
• enhancement/ for smaller improvements, and
• bugfix/ for non-trivial bug fixes.

As soon as development reaches a point where feedback is appreciated, a pull request is opened. After some time (very soon for bug fixes, and other improvements should have a reasonable feedback phase) the pull request is merged and the development branch will be deleted. Trivial bug fixes which will be part of the next PATCH version will be merged directly into master.

Build & Release process

This is work in progress. Please refer to #268 for details.

Defined below is a specification to which the Build and Release process of Pico should follow. We use travis-ci to automate the process, and each commit to master should be deployable. Once a feature/branch or the master branch have reached a point where the need for a version increase is necessary, move through these phases to generate a Pico release.

Commit phase

• Make/Commit/Merge changes

• Use a formatted commit message with contents of CHANGELOG.md since last release.

  Example:

  Pico Version 1.0.1
  * [New] ...
  * [Changed] ...
  * [Removed] ...
  * [Security] ...
  

• Tagging a commit on the master branch will trigger an automatic build..

• Please submit pull-requests with a properly formatted commit message and SemVer increase to avoid the need for manual amendments.

Analysis phase

Does the commit pass all travis-ci checks?

• We test PHP 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 5.6, 7, the nighlty build, and HHVM

• should we allow_failures: in .tavis.yml?

  • php: hhvm
  • php: 7

If not, all errors will need to be corrected before the build can complete.

Packaging phase

travis-ci

• will run composer locally.
• will create a ZIP archive (so vendor/ is included)

manually

• build current documentation using PhpDocumentor

  phpdoc -d path/to/Pico/ -t path/to/Pico/build/docs/master

  When running phpDocumentor there are three command-line options that are essential:

  • -d, specifies the directory, or directories, of your project that you want to document.
  • -f, specifies a specific file, or files, in your project that you want to document.
  • -t, specifies the location where your documentation will be written (also called ‘target folder’).

TO-DO: in the future, this should be automatic.

• can phpDocumentor be included in Pico's composer.json?
• can travis-ci run phpDocumentor? php vendor/bin/phpdoc ...
• can travis-ci run a shell script to:
  • git clone, git add, git commit, git push to gh-pages? e.g. git clone -b gh-pages "https://github.com/picocms/Pico.git"
  • (below) rename docs/master ...
  • git push
• organize in build folder?

Release phase

travis-ci

• will create new Git release at tag
• will include the properly formatted commit message including the changelog of items since the last release.
• will include ZIP archive in release

manually

TO-DO: in the future, this should be automatic. (See above)

• rename docs/master folder in gh-pages branch to the name of the previous Pico release. (e.g. docs/pico-1.0.0)
• upload current documentation to the gh-pages branch /docs/master
• update release information on GitHub with:
  • release title (taken from changelog)
  • changelog

automatically

• Pico will be automatically updated on Packagist

Announcements

• Releases will be available at https://github.com/picocms/Pico/releases