Guidelines for community contributions

Every month the Mattermost community plans, builds, tests, documents, releases, and supports new product improvements for Team Edition to benefit the user community. The Mattermost Enterprise Team does the same for Enterprise Edition to benefit the subscriber community.

A critical part of this development is documentation which ranges from feature documentation to FAQs, guides, and tutorials.

Submit documentation with your PR

We want to empower everyone to contribute to our documentation, and be comfortable submitting documentation for contributions. As such, we don't expect every contribution to adhere to our style guide when first submitted.

During the review process the editorial team also provides feedback on style elements to bring the submission in line with the Documentation Style Guide.

Here are some guidelines:

• When submitting a code PR, please include updated documentation if applicable.

• The documentation update can be in the form of a bullet list or an outline.

• Label the PR as Docs Needed/Editor Review and tag @justinegeffen or @carriewarnermm.

• The documentation you've submitted will be reviewed.

• At times, the editors may make and commit stylistic changes (such as punctuation) but any content changes will be added as a suggestion for the submitter's consideration.

• Once the PR is approved, it will be merged, and the documentation will be updated.

You can read more about the review process here. There's also a great blog post that covers additional aspects of submitting code PRs, such as git strategies.

Note: This process does not apply to the API Documentation requirements as it is updated automatically and isn't part of the documentation process.

Feature documentation

Feature documentation is a collaborative effort between the Product Manager and Technical Writer within a specific timeframe aligned with releases. Community members are welcome to assist, if the time expectations are manageable.

Feature request documentation is usually located in the mattermost-server repo and the mattermost-webapp repo and are labelled as Docs/Needed. As these are tied to a release (and a deadline) it’s best to only take on the work if you’re sure you can complete it on time. It’s understood that community members contribute in their available time, which is why this type of documentation isn’t usually the best option to take on.

Help Wanted tickets/doc issues

Help Wanted tickets are generally not linked to a release and are more flexible in terms of timeline and delivery date. You can find the documentation Help Wanted tickets here. To start working on one, assign it to yourself, add a comment indicating you’ll be working on it, find the relevant document in the source directory, read through the README file if you're not familiar with the process, and get started.

If you have any questions, you can post them in the Documentation channel and we'll be happy to help.

Engineering/developer documentation

Most, if not all, contributions to the Mattermost project have a documentation impact. As part of the development and submission process, it’s recommended that the relevant documentation be updated (or created) and included in the PR. This provides consistency and accuracy in communicating the changes/new feature and cuts down on having multiple issues and PRs for related documentation.

Visit the Contribute to Documentation page to get started with submitting documentation with your PR. You can read more about the review process here.