Add contributing-specific file

1 files changed, 58 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/CONTRIBUTING.markdown b/CONTRIBUTING.markdown
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..d7468898
--- /dev/null
+++ b/CONTRIBUTING.markdown
@@ -0,0 +1,58 @@
+# 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 key information to 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] arrays to provide 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
+---
+```