Thank you for your interest in contributing to the October CMS project. We appreciate any assistance that community members and users of October CMS are willing to provide. You can contribute to the project in several different ways:
- Reporting a Security Vulnerability
- Reporting an issue with October CMS
- Making a Feature Request
- Making a Pull Request
- Testing Pull Requests
Please review our security policy on how to report security vulnerabilities. Please do not report security vulnerabilities on GitHub.
NOTE: If your issue is related to an October CMS plugin, please see the Reporting an issue with an October CMS plugin section below.
We work hard to process bugs that are reported, to assist with this please ensure the following details are always included:
-
Summary: Make sure your summary reflects what the problem is and where it is. Provide as much detail as possible, the more information we have to work with the more likely it is that your problem can be solved.
-
Installed build and plugins: Please provide the build number of October CMS that is exhibiting the fault, and the version numbers of any installed and active plugins on your installation. You may retrieve this information by logging in to the Backend and navigating to Settings and then Updates & Plugins.
-
Reproduce steps: Clearly mention the steps to reproduce the bug.
-
Expected behavior: Describe how October CMS should behave on above mentioned steps.
-
Actual behavior: What is the actual result on running above steps i.e. the bug behavior - include any error messages.
If possible, please provide any screenshots or GIFs of the issue occurring to provide us with additional context to determine the cause of the issue.
NOTE: If you're reporting an issue that you intend to fix yourself, you can skip the Issue step and just submit a Pull Request that fixes the issue (along with a detailed description of the original problem) instead.
-
Register for an account on GitHub, if you don't already have one.
-
Search for similar issues. Perhaps someone has already reported your issue! If so, please add clarification and/or more information to the existing issue.
-
Create a new issue. If you don't find any similar issues, you can report your issue via the "issues" tab once you've logged in.
-
Monitor your issue and respond to questions. It may be necessary to provide additional information upon request or you might be asked if the issue still occurs after an update.
-
Close your issue. In case you notice that the issue doesn't occur anymore, you can close the issue yourself (don't forget to add a note saying that the issue is resolved and ideally any additional information on how it was resolved).
If you find out your bug is actually a duplicate of another bug and only notice that after you created it, please also close your bug with a short reference to the other issue that was there before.
Please don't use the main GitHub for reporting issues with plugins.
If you have found a bug in a plugin, the best place to report it is with the plugin author.
If you are unable to contact the plugin author and the issue prevents the plugin from being used correctly, please feel free to email [email protected]
, mentioning the plugin name, URL and the issue found. We will then determine if the plugin needs to be delisted.
We do our best to attend to all reported issues. If you have an important issue that requires attention, consider submitting a bounty using the October CMS Bounty Program.
NOTE: Please don't use GitHub issues for suggesting a new feature. If you have a feature idea, the best place to suggest it is the October CMS website forum.
Only use GitHub if you are planning on contributing a new feature and developing it. If you want to discuss your idea first, before "officially" posting it anywhere, you can always join us on Discord.
Feature Requests submitted as GitHub Issues specifically mean "I'd like to see this feature, I'm going to be working on some code to implement it." It is more like a Pre-Pull Request, in which a developer signifies that he or she wants to see a feature implemented that they think would be really great, and they're committed to coding it.
It's a great way to launch discussions on the developer side of things because both the core team and the community developer get a chance to talk about the technical side of the feature implementation. It's a great way to exchange ideas about how the logic could work in code.
Your contributions to the project are very welcome. If you would like to fix a bug or propose a new feature, you can submit a Pull Request.
To help us merge your Pull Request, please make sure you follow these points:
- Describe the problem clearly in the Pull Request description
- Please make your fix on the
develop
branch. This makes merging much easier. - Do not edit compiled core asset files such as
october.css
,storm.js
,framework.css
,framework.combined.js
,framework-min.js
, etc. directly. Instead, edit the relevant source / non-minified / non-combined LESS / JS files. For third-party vendor files, you should update both the .min and non-min versions. Afterwards, runphp artisan october:util compile assets
from the project root to compile all the source asset files; and then commit the changes. For a list of options available for thecompile assets
command, see https://octobercms.com/docs/console/commands#october-util-command - For any change that you make, please also add a test case(s) in the
tests/unit
directory. This helps us understand the issue and make sure that it will stay fixed forever.
Thank you for your contributions!
It is ideal to keep your development branch or fork synchronised with the core October CMS develop
branch when submitting Pull Requests, as this minimises the possibility of merge conflicts.
To keep in sync with October CMS, add the core OctoberCMS repository as a Git remote (ie. upstream
) and pull changes from the OctoberCMS repository into your local develop
branch as often as possible:
git remote add upstream [email protected]:octobercms/october.git
git fetch upstream
git checkout develop
git pull upstream develop
This ensures that your local develop
branch matches October CMS. When developing a pull request, it is best to use your own development branch. For example, creating a fix to improve spelling on a language file could be made into a branch called lang-en-spelling-fixes
, which can be branched off from the develop
branch.
git checkout -b lang-en-spelling-fixes develop
When you wish to update your development branch with the latest changes from the develop
branch, it is just a simple merge:
git merge develop
This will merge all the latest changes from the October CMS develop
branch into your development branch.
Occassionally, you may encounter a merge conflict with your Pull Request. This most commonly occurs if another change made to the October CMS repository was made to a file that your Pull Request has also changed.
It is the responsibility of the author of the Pull Request to resolve any merge conflicts before their Pull Request is accepted.
You should ensure that your local copy of October CMS is synchronised with the develop
branch in the October CMS repository. Please follow the steps above to synchronise the repositories.
If Git reports that your changes have conflicts, you will need to resolve the changes in a way that includes the changes from the OctoberCMS repository as well as implementing your Pull Request's changes. See GitHub's guide to resolving a merge conflict for tips on resolving conflicts.
Please ensure that your Pull Request satisfies the following coding standards:
To validate your changes against our coding standards, you may run ./vendor/bin/phpcs -nq --extensions="php"
in your development folder.
The October CMS team follows the developer guidelines as much as possible.
Although we aim to test all pull requests made to the October CMS repository, the maintainers of October CMS are volunteers and may not be able to promptly attend to all pull requests.
To help speed things up, any assistance with testing Pull Requests and fixes will be very appreciated. The best Pull Requests to test are those that are tagged as Testing Needed in the repository.
To test a Pull Request, you can use the steps below in a terminal or command-line interface to create a fresh installation of October CMS with the changes made in the Pull Request, ready to test. In this example, we have a user called qwerty123
that has created a pull request with an ID of #4509
.
-
Check out a copy of the October CMS repository to a folder that you can view in your web browser:
git clone [email protected]:octobercms/october.git
. This will add the files into a subfolder calledoctober
. -
Then, go to the
october
subfolder and check out @qwerty123's changes in a branch in your local repository:git fetch origin pull/4509/head:pr-4509
. This will pull their changes into a branch calledpr-4509
. You will then need to check out the branch:git checkout pr-4509
. -
Next, get the Composer dependencies:
composer update
. -
Next run
git checkout pr-4509
again in case composer overwrote the changes. -
Next, run
php artisan october:env
to create a.env
file in your folder. This will contain the configuration values for the database and site. -
Finally, once you've populated that file with your database and site details, run
php artisan october:up
to install the necessary database tables.
At this point, you should have a working copy of the Pull Request ready to test.