Fwd: /contribute on project sites

Hi SVN devs,

I thought the below post on dev_at_community.a.o might be interesting to
whoever might be working on our website.

Or see it in the archives with possible followups:
https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/r5b6538a600f7e8ad1a7c31d2b1881882fea190b80930e51a591f500e%40%3Cdev.community.apache.org%3E

(If you're interested, such topics come up once in a while on
dev_at_community.a.o, so do subscribe there if you want to find out more
/ want to engage some more with the wider ASF community)

Just a FYI.
Cheers,

-- 
Johan
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Rich Bowen <rbowen_at_rcbowen.com>
Date: Sat, Apr 4, 2020 at 2:52 PM
Subject: /contribute on project sites
To: <dev_at_community.apache.org>
Hi, folks,
Over the last couple of weeks, I've been tackling the red boxes on
https://whimsy.apache.org/site/ with patches, and I've noticed
something. In almost every case, I have to hunt and hunt and hunt to
figure out 1) where the website source is, 2) where the project source
code is, and 3) how one is supposed to submit a patch/PR for one or the
other.
Now, I'm not suggesting any kind of top-down mandate or anything, but I
was considering writing up a "best practice" kind of thing for
community.apache.org encouraging projects to have certain standard
elements on their project sites, so that it's easy for someone (let's be
honest, this is all about me) to go to a project site and immediately
know how to get involved.
The first thing that I would like to recommend is that every Apache
project site have a /contribute page that contains the following elements:
Where:
Where is the project source code?
Where is the website source?
Where is the documentation source (if separate from the above two)
Where does the discussion happen? (Mailing lists, IRC, Slack, etc)
How:
How should one submit changes (ie, patch to mailing list? PR on Github?
etc.)
What:
What language(s) are used?
What framework (if any) is needed to build/test website/documentation
changes?
What should people consider working on? (ie, where do you keep your
tickets/bugs/TODO items?)
Simple. Standard. In a consistent place. So that I don't have to spend
so much time hunting every time I want to fix a typo on a project site.
(I'm a big fan of "hackable" URLs, and knowing that I can go to, say
aardvark.apache.org/contribute and know there will be something useful
there.)
Thoughts? Is "/contribute" the right thing to call this, or have you
seen it called something clearer elsewhere?
I'll be starting with "my" projects, so that we can have some
example/boilerplate to point people to.
(Yes, this is all part of my larger plan to have "best practice"
documentation that our projects can borrow/steal from. One of the things
that makes Apache so appealing to users is that they know what to expect
in terms of license and quality and governance. I'd like to extend that
to other aspects of our projects, so that there's a consistent(ish)
experience across projects. But we have to do this by leading, not by
compelling/requiring, because that's not how we do things.)
--
Rich Bowen
rbowen_at_rcbowen.com
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