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General contribution guidelines

Thank you for your interest in improving Cipher Host! We are a WordPress hosting company built in the open, and we rely on the help of people like you to make it even better.

While each repository may have its own specific contributing guidelines, this document outlines how you can help shape the future of our company and services in a broader sense.

Code of conduct

Our code of conduct governs all interactions within our community and repositories. Please read and understand it before contributing. We are committed to providing a welcoming and inclusive environment for all contributors.

Background

First of all, it is important to state: We appreciate your support in every way you choose to contribute. Cipher Host is a large project that will only work with your help, and we are grateful for the time and effort you are willing to invest in helping us make it better.

Understanding how we work

There are a number of things to understand when thinking about contributing to Cipher Host.

  • Small core team The core development team for Cipher Host is small, with only three people at the moment. The team's top priorities right now are building the core blocks of the platform, as well as guiding the project's overall direction.
  • Prioritized contributions To help us to manage our limited resources, we encourage starting by checking the relevant repository labels for issues that are marked as help welcome.
  • Project tooling We use GitHub for development and most of our communication, but some of our team's discussions happen in other tools, and not all of those are publicly available.

Project-specific considerations

  • Limitations Some repositories will not accept many direct outside contributions due to their complexity, dependencies, or use case. We appreciate your ideas, but probably will not take many pull requests externally. If that is the case, you will see that reflected in the project's CONTRIBUTING.md file.
  • Design consistency UI and visual design elements are overseen by our professional designer to ensure a cohesive brand and user experience across the company. We work with that professional on visual and brand updates, so please do not submit pull requests for visual changes.

Decision-making process

There is a team working on Cipher Host, not a single individual. This core team discusses implementation choices, and maintains the final say on which changes make it into the platform and our services.

We aim to make decisions transparently, considering community feedback and the overall project needs. We are always open to considering future improvements to our workflow and decision-making process.

Cipher Host is an open source company, but it is not always possible to accept every contribution. We appreciate your understanding and patience if your contributions are not accepted.

Contributing

There are many ways to get involved. Here are some other ideas:

  • Documentation Improve existing documentation or help to identify areas that need improvement.
  • Issue triage Assist with categorizing new issues, reproduce reported bugs, test fixes, and find duplicates. A high-quality, validated issue list helps the core team stay on top of things.
  • Testing Expand the test suites in our projects by writing new test cases and improving existing ones.
  • Code Fix bugs, implement new features (see the sections below), and improve code quality. Take a look at the good first issue and help welcome labels in the project's issue tracker.

Issues

Sensitive security-related issues should be reported to security@cipher.host. See our security policy for details.

Bug reports and feature suggestions must use descriptive and concise titles and be submitted via GitHub Issues.

Please use the search function to make sure that you are not submitting duplicates, and that a similar report or request has not already been resolved or rejected.

Submitting code changes

  • Features Please do not work on major features and ideas without first creating an issue for discussion. We are a small team, and are unlikely to be able to pick these up as quickly as you might prefer.
  • Smaller fixes If you are fixing a bug, please open a pull request. Ensure that your changes include passing tests, adhere to our coding style, and that the PR references the issue it resolves.
  • Testing New features should also come with additional tests to ensure they work as expected, and don't break existing code.

Pull requests

Adhere to the following rules when submitting your PR:

  • Keep it small: Avoid changing too many things at once.
  • Individual PRs: One PR per issue, please.
  • Commit messages: Take a moment to write meaningful commit messages. Drew DeVault's post on this is a good read.
  • Quality assurance: Review your spelling and grammar.
  • Testing: Write tests and ensure your changes do not break any existing functionality.
  • Documentation: Update or write documentation as needed.
  • Coding style: Maintain the style of the codebase in your contributions.

Remember to sign-off on your commits by running git commit --signoff before pushing. To understand what this means, read the Linux Kernel Developer's Certificate of Origin.

License

Unless otherwise noted, by contributing to a Cipher Host project you agree to license your contributions under the current license of the repository in question, which is usually located at /LICENSE.md.

Attribution

These contribution guidelines are based on the Mastodon contributing guidelines.