Closed Bug 688672 Opened 13 years ago Closed 11 years ago

Add Web Development to Get Involved pages and to Want to Help? form

Categories

(www.mozilla.org :: General, defect)

Product:
www.mozilla.org
Component:
General
Platform:
x86
macOS
Type:
defect
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
RESOLVED FIXED

People

(Reporter: davidwboswell, Unassigned)

References

(
URL
)

Details

Opening bug to track adding webdev to the Get Involved pages.  

This would involve creating a section for it on the Area of Interest page (there's currently just a link to a webdev get involved page as part of the Coding section) and also adding it to the Want to Help? form so people can get in touch with any questions.

I'm cc'ing jdm on this since he's been fielding Coding inquiries from the form and that has included some webdev questions.  I'd be interested in his thoughts about the pros and cons of keeping this as part of Coding and calling Web Development out as it's own area.

I'm also cc'ing Casey who just submitted his first patch to a Mozilla site a couple days ago (see bug 521734) and he probably has some very useful insights about what information we should be providing to people interested in contributing to our sites.
I think it's a good idea. I tend to put off responding to webdev inquiries because I don't have the autoreply in my copy paste buffer when I'm blowing through a bunch of coding responses.
Thank you David. A couple things I personally have run into issues with are
1. Finding out where the repo live to clone/checkout
2. Once I have the code checked  out the process for getting it up and running on my local machine wasn't as easy as i think it could be. The config file being the blocker for me. I didn't know about it until I asked in the chat.
3. Patch submission are a little cumbersome using the DIFF. This was solved by a link David posted (https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Creating_a_patch)

Things I did like.
1. Response on the "Want to Help" submission form was very fast from my experience.

I think we can improve the experience a little by highlighting the mozilla.org doc for web development a little better (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla.org) .

Another thing im seeing is you really learn a lot by just doing some of the work, if there are small easy bugs we can assign and have people take the time to do them (thats the hard part), that will really help.

Please let me know what I can do to help.
Blocks: 688911
Casey, thanks for the feedback.  It's good to hear about the problems you ran into.

It looks like we're going to need several bugs to address all of the related issues.  For instance, we should improve documentation to make it easier for people to figure out where the repos live for different sites.  I just opened bug 688909 for updating the current webdev get involved docs at

http://blog.mozilla.com/webdev/get-involved/

I also opened bug 688911 as a tracking bug for all of the ways we can improve the process.  Feel free to open new bugs for specific issues and set them to block that tracking bug (for instance, if you'd track compiling a list of good first webdev bugs).  

That having been said, let's keep talking here about what we want to include in the Get Involved pages about webdev.
Another thing that I think could really help community involvement is source controlling through Github. I know this has been thought of and is not easy to do, the only reason im putting it here is i just watched a video from the Future of Web App's LAs VEgas where Tom Preston-werner did a talk on Github and there were some amazing pieces on community contribution when code gets placed on Github. I know this is not an easy take to move from one source control system to another just wanted to note i t here.
(In reply to Casey Becking from comment #4)
> Another thing that I think could really help community involvement is source
> controlling through Github.

FWIW, most of our new projects are there already:
https://github.com/mozilla/

But, I think we do have some lingering webdev projects in SVN:
http://svn.mozilla.org/projects/
Blocks: 694233
If there's list of webdev addresses to receive web-related emails to contribute@mozilla.org, please add me to it. Thanks.
(In reply to Luke Crouch [:groovecoder] from comment #6)
> If there's list of webdev addresses to receive web-related emails to
> contribute@mozilla.org, please add me to it. Thanks.

Great.  We haven't invited people to ask about webdev contribution opportunities since we didn't have anyone to respond to those, but if you'd like to receive them I'll get 'Web Development' added to the Want to Help? form and CC you on the inquiries.

The form has the option to add an auto-response, but you can also respond manually.  If you'd like to have an auto-response set up, let me know.
Mentioned this on another mail thread, but: Would it make sense to file an IT bug to get a listserv going that would receive Get Involved mails and distribute them to subscribed stewards?
(In reply to l.m.orchard [:lorchard] from comment #8)
> Mentioned this on another mail thread, but: Would it make sense to file an
> IT bug to get a listserv going that would receive Get Involved mails and
> distribute them to subscribed stewards?

There is one :)

https://mail.mozilla.org/admin/contribute/members/list

Some people prefer to just have the inquiries sent to them, but if anyone would prefer to be subscribed to that list, let me know.  It's easy to filter posts to the list by subject line.  For instance, every webdev inquiry has 'Inquiry about Mozilla Webdev' as the subject.
Web development is now in the Want to Help? form and I sent through a test message.  Luke, let me know if you didn't get that.

As mentioned above, if other people want to get these too, that's great.  We can subscribe whoever wants to see these to the contribute at mozilla dot org list.

I'm leaving the bug open, because in addition to adding this to the form we should have a 'Web Development' section on the Areas of Interest page for people who want to read more.
As I mentioned to Luke over email, it's fine if more than one person wants to get these inquiries and share the responses.

For tracking, I just added lorchard to the contribute list and currently Luke is not on the list but is having webdev inquiries emailed to him.
I'd like to subscribe to the list rather than receive the emails directly, I think.

Josh, you said you have an auto response for Webdev already? Can you send it to me?

Thanks.
Actually, I wrote you because I didn't have a good response, and wanted to correct that :)
(In reply to Luke Crouch [:groovecoder] from comment #12)
> I'd like to subscribe to the list rather than receive the emails directly, I
> think.

OK, I just subscribed you to contribute@ and removed you from the CC on webdev inquiries.  Let me know if you aren't getting messages.
(In reply to Josh Matthews [:jdm] from comment #13)

I just wrote this up and sent it out to a few emails ...

Thanks for your interest in Mozilla Webdev!

The easiest place to start is probably one of our larger site projects[1] - each has a dedicated team and established communication channels. You can jump right in on IRC and start asking questions.

Mozilla has hundreds of other websites[2] and much of the source code is available online. Do you have something specific you want to help with?

[Personalized sentence here]

Thanks again, hope to hear back from you.

1 https://blog.mozilla.com/webdev/get-involved/
2 https://www.mozilla.org/community/directory.html
Luke, the message looks good.  Feel free to add this to the Canned Messages wiki page so other people can copy and paste this if they're also handling responses to webdev inquiries.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla.org/Contribute/Canned_responses

And if you'd like to make this an auto-response at some point, let me know -- you can still follow up to inquiries with an auto-response in place if people have specific questions you want to answer.
I think this is done and now we're just refining the canned-response text?
(In reply to Luke Crouch [:groovecoder] from comment #17)
> I think this is done and now we're just refining the canned-response text?

I think it would also be useful to have a paragraph about Webdev that gives people a bit more information about what this is about and how to get involved that can be included on the Areas of Interest page at

http://www.mozilla.org/contribute/areas.html

I think it's useful for each item in the Want to help? drop-down to coincide with a short blurb here so people can reference that to find out more if they're interested.
Component: www.mozilla.org → General
Product: Websites → www.mozilla.org
Closing as fixed.  I believe everything discussed here is now in place on the Get Involved page.
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 11 years ago
Resolution: --- → FIXED
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