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# Contributing To TurboGears 2

If you want to help out, we want to help you help out! The goal of this document is to help you get started and answer any questions you might have. The Project Philosophy document has a more high-level view, whereas this document is nuts-and-bolts. The TurboGears team page lists who is responsible for what (a little outdated don’t trust it much).

## Installation and Tools

To contribute to core, you will want to do a Source Install (Development Version) so that you can use Mercurial (hg) to generate patches. You may want to review Using BitBucket’s Mercurial Service with TurboGears if you would like to use the BitBucket service to collaborate with other developers easily.

## Communication Channels

> - Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is the primary channel for collaboration and communication for the core developers. Freenode’s TurboGears Channel is the primary channel for getting interactive answers to questions.
> - If you want to post a piece of code, a traceback, or any significant piece of text in the IRC channel, consider using a PasteBin service.
> - The TurboGears mailing list allows for asking longer-form questions and can be accessed without an IRC client, such as when you are behind a corporate firewall.

## Source Layout

TurboGears 2 is composed of two core packages.

- tg package is TurboGears 2 core.

- tg.devtools is a set of tools used for developing turbogears

    applications but not needed for running them.

## Coding Style

Since it’s hard to argue with someone who’s already written a code style document, TurboGears 2 follows PEP 8 conventions. The only rule we do not enforce is the 80 characters per line, as templates and other web related files simply don’t fit into 80 chars in a natural way.

To ensure that files in the TurboGears source code repository have proper line-endings, you must configure your Subversion client. Please see the patching guidelines for details.

## Testing

Automated unit tests are essential to make the future growth of the project as error free as possible. Please see Setting up the TurboGears Test Environment and Testing for more information about how to set up your environment with TurboGears for testing.

## Documenting Changes

The TurboGears Trac is mostly used for tracking upcoming changes and tasks required before release of a new version. The changelog provides the human readable list of changes.

Updating the changelog right before a release just slows down the release. Please update the changelog as you make changes, and this is especially critical for backwards incompatibilities.

## How To Submit A Patch

Please make sure that you read and follow the patching guidelines.

## Documentation

As mentioned in the Project Philosophy document, a feature doesn’t truly exist until it’s documented. Tests can serve as good documentation, because you at least know that they’re accurate. But, it’s also nice to have some information in English.

There are two kinds of docs, and both have their useful place:

API reference
  These are generated with sphinx and normally include both TG docs and the sphinx sources of all upstream packages (that use sphinx)
Manual
  The TurboGears 2.1.5 documentation is online at http://turbogears.org/2.1/docs/

Please document your own work. It doesn’t have to be Shakespeare, but the editors don’t enjoy writing documentation any more than you do (we’d rather be coding) and it’s much easier to edit an existing doc than it is to figure out your code and write something from scratch.

Todo

Difficulty: Medium. More doc types will be defined here when doc templates are brought online.

## Contributing Documentation

Please see the document Documentation Generation Guide for detailed instructions on how to submit documentation to the TurboGears project.