Merge pull request #1753 from onebree/contrib

Add contributing-specific file

1 files changed, 70 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/CONTRIBUTING.markdown b/CONTRIBUTING.markdown
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..9ee33ebc
--- /dev/null
+++ b/CONTRIBUTING.markdown
@@ -0,0 +1,70 @@
+# Contributing
+
+All contributions are welcome, from the tiniest typo to a brand new article.
+Translations in all languages are welcome (or, for that matter, original
+articles in any language). Send a pull request or open an issue any time of day
+or night.
+
+**Please prepend the tag `[language/lang-code]` to your issues and pull
+requests.** For example, `[python/en]` for English Python. This will help
+everyone pick out things they care about.
+
+We're happy for any contribution in any form, but if you're making more than one
+major change (i.e. translations for two different languages) it would be super
+cool of you to make a separate pull request for each one so that someone can
+review them more effectively and/or individually.
+
+## Style Guidelines
+
+- **Keep lines of under 80 chars**
+  + Try to keep **line length in code blocks to 80 characters or fewer**.
+  + Otherwise, the text will overflow and look odd.
+- **Prefer example to exposition**
+  + Try to use as few words as possible.
+  + Code examples are preferred over exposition in all cases.
+- **Eschew surplusage**
+  + We welcome newcomers, but the target audience for this site is programmers
+    with some experience.
+  + Try to avoid explaining basic concepts except for those specific to the
+    language in question.
+  + Keep articles succinct and scannable. We all know how to use Google here.
+- **Use UTF-8**
+  + For translations (or EN articles with non-ASCII characters) please make sure
+    your file is UTF-8 encoded.
+  + Try to leave out the byte-order-mark at the start of the file. (`:set nobomb`
+    in Vim)
+
+
+### Header configuration
+
+The actual site uses Middleman to generate HTML files from these Markdown ones.
+Middleman, or at least the custom scripts underpinning the site, requires that
+some key information be defined in the header.
+
+The following fields are necessary for English articles about programming
+languages:
+
+- **language** The *programming language* in question
+- **contributors** A list of [author, URL] lists to credit
+
+Other fields:
+
+- **filename**: The filename for this article's code. It will be fetched, mashed
+  together, and made downloadable.
+    + For non-English articles, *filename* should   have a language-specific 
+      suffix.
+- **lang**: For translations, the human language this article is in. For
+  categorization, mostly.
+
+Here's an example header for an Esperanto translation of Ruby:
+
+```yaml
+---
+language: ruby
+filename: learnruby-epo.ruby
+contributors:
+    - ["Doktor Esperanto", "http://example.com/"]
+    - ["Someone else", "http://someoneelseswebsite.com/"]
+lang: ep-ep
+---
+```