How to contribute to Roller

The Apache Roller project is being built by the open source community for the open source community - we welcome your input and contributions!

What we are looking for:

• Source code and fixes contributions
• Documentation assistance
• Product and feature suggestions
• Detailed and constructive feedback
• Articles and white-papers

Contributing to Roller should be easy and if it's not, please stop by the Roller mailing lists and tell us how we can make it easier. This document is a short guide to help contributors get started.

Anybody can contribute to Roller and anybody can join the project, it's an all-volunteer effort. The way to join the project is to subscribe to the development mailing list and start acting like a member of the project: asking questions, making suggestions, responding to question, proposing changes and submitting fixes and patches. If you get along well with others, do quality work and show some commitment to the project somebody will most likely nominate you to be a committer.

Join the developer mailing list

Join the developer mailing list, ask questions and help with those asked by others. Tell us how you use Roller, what you like and dislike. Discuss ideas you have for improving any aspect of the Roller project from the website to the documentation and code.

Get your fixes and improvements in

If you've used Roller, you probably made small fixes and perhaps even add some new features. Getting these fixes and improvements helps Roller and it helps you because, once you get your fixes in you don't have to worry about adding them again when new versions of Roller come out.

• Download the Roller code from SVN and get setup to build it. There are instructions for this on the Roller Source Code page and in the How to build Roller.

• Learn the code-base. Install a Maven plugin into your IDE so you can easily explore the Roller modules and source code base. Check out the Developer Resources page for documents and presentations that introduce the Roller architecture.

• Study the parts of the code you'd like to change, enhance, add to, etc. Subscribe to the Roller dev mailing list so you can ask the experts.

• Before you contribute a patch you must send in your individual contributor agreement (ICLA) to the Apache Software Foundation via mail or FAX. See: http://www.apache.org/licenses/icla.txt

• Discuss the changes you wish with the mailing list. Try to get consensus on the need for the changes and the implementation.

• Implement your changes and once you've got them working, create a new issue in Roller's JIRA issue tracker https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ROL and attach your patch to that. Please prepare patches as described here: http://www.apache.org/dev/contributors.html#patches

Propose and develop cool new features

If you're a Roller user already, you probably have ideas for some cool new features. If you're new to Roller, a student or teacher looking for project ideas then ask on the mailing list for ideas.

Another way to find project ideas is to help triage Roller bug reports and RFEs in our issue tracking system (https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ROL). You'll definitely find ideas for fixes, improvements and new features that way. This may sound boring but it can be very helpful to the project because we have lots of old and no longer relevant issue reports that should be closed, deleted or marked as duplicates.