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Contributing §

Thanks for wanting to contribute! Open a PR or an issue for anything.

When contributing §

When you contribute to a pattern, add yourself as an author so you get credit on the website and on the Authors page, which lists every contributor alongside the patterns they've worked on.

There are two short steps:

  1. Add yourself to authors.yml (at the root of this repo) if you're not already there. Pick a short slug — usually firstname-lastname — and fill in your name, ORCID (optional), and affiliation (optional). For example:

yaml jane-doe: name: Jane Doe orcid: 0000-0001-2345-6789 affiliation: Example University

  1. Add your slug to the pattern's authors: frontmatter at the top of the pattern file. For example:

```yaml

tags: - Community Building authors: - jane-doe

```

You do not need to edit the "Contributors & Acknowledgement" section at the bottom of the pattern — the site generates that automatically from the frontmatter.

The RSS feed §

The site publishes an RSS feed of new patterns at /feed_rss_created.xml so readers can subscribe to updates. A couple of things to know as a contributor:

  • Your ORCID, if you provide one, appears publicly in each feed item for every pattern you've co-authored — as a clickable link to your ORCID profile. This is the same ORCID that already shows up on the pattern page itself; the feed just makes it travel further.
  • The first paragraph of your pattern becomes the feed blurb. Try to make that opening sentence stand on its own — it's what readers will see in their RSS reader before they click through.
  • My pattern isn't in the feed — why? Three usual culprits: 1. The file is not at the repo root (everything in authors/ and the four meta files — README.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, PATTERN-TEMPLATE.md, and any new top-level non-pattern doc listed in the match_path of .config/mkdocs.yml — is excluded by design). 2. The pattern has no git history yet (it must have been committed at least once; the feed uses the first commit as the publication date). 3. The build is older than your latest commit — the feed is regenerated on every deploy.

Local Development §

If you want to test the MkDocs site locally:

  1. Install MkDocs Material (requires Python):

bash pip install -r .config/requirements.txt pip install mkdocs-material

  1. Run the development server:

bash cd .config mkdocs serve

  1. View the site: Open your browser to http://127.0.0.1:8000

The development server will automatically reload when you make changes to any markdown files.