Contributing to jQuery Foundation Documentation

For almost as long as jQuery has been around, its documentation has been an integral part of the project, from helping new users get up to speed to offering detailed explanations of features for seasoned developers. Currently, the jQuery Foundation manages API documentation and demos for its projects and provides a growing set of tutorials on its learning site.

link Getting Involved

If you'd like to help us improve the documentation of any of jQuery's projects, we would love to have your contributions. All of our documentation sites are on GitHub, and their repository names match their website domains. For example, you can find jQuery UI documentation at jqueryui.com and api.jqueryui.com, so their repositories are located at github.com/jquery/jqueryui.com and github.com/jquery/api.jqueryui.com. Before you do anything else, you ought to sign up for a free GitHub account if you don't have one already. If you're comfortable with git and GitHub, you can dive right in by forking a repo, making some changes, and sending a pull request. If not, here are some suggestions for getting involved:

link Report an Issue

Perhaps the easiest way to help is to report an issue or problem about the current documentation. We use GitHub's issue tracker for all of our documentation sites. Just head on over to one of the following issue lists to see if your issue has already been reported, and if it hasn't, give us a detailed rundown of the issue:

link Write or Edit Content

If you actually want to make the fixes and improvements, then you'll need to fork the repositories you'd like to work on. Once you've made changes you'd like reviewed for integration, submit a pull request. However, we recommend that you file issues for new "features" and significant changes before actually getting to work. For more information on maintaining your fork and strategies on committing, see the Commits and Pull Requests guide.

All of the API sites use XML for their documentation, while most of the others use a combination of HTML and Markdown. Familiarizing yourself with Markdown is a good idea in general, and it would certainly facilitate your contributions to our sites.

Each of the documentation repositories comes with a build process that uses the node.js task-based build tool grunt. It's a good practice to run the grunt command after changing content because the command runs a "lint" program that checks for invalid XML and other errors. For small changes, you probably won't need to see the formatted result in a web page. For more significant changes, however, it's a good idea to do so before submitting a pull request in order to avoid mistakes and oversights. All of our sites use WordPress, and we employ the Grunt build system rather than the WordPress admin area to update it. For more information about setting up node.js, Grunt, WordPress, or any other aspect of your local development environment for working on jQuery sites, see Contributing to Web Sites.

link Getting Help

If you have any questions about getting things set up or if you're not sure about how to address a problem with the documentation, we're here to help.

The best place to get help is on IRC in the #jquery-content channel on Freenode. If you're unfamiliar with IRC, you can use the webchat gateway.

In addition, the jQuery Content Team holds a public meeting every two weeks on Freenode, at 1PM Eastern time in the #jquery-meeting channel.

If IRC is not your thing, but you still want to get in touch, please use the site's GitHub repo or send us an e-mail to content at jquery dot org.