shields/CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to Shields

Shields is a community project. We invite your participation through financial contributions, issues, and pull requests!

Ways you can help

Financial contributions

We welcome financial contributions in full transparency on our open collective. Anyone can file an expense. If the expense makes sense for the development of the community, it will be "merged" into the ledger of our open collective by the core contributors and the person who filed the expense will be reimbursed.

Contributing code

This project has quite a backlog of suggestions! If you're new to the project, maybe you'd like to open a pull request to address one of them:

Or you can adopt one of these pull requests:

Contributing documentation

You can help by improving the project's usage and developer instructions.

Helping others

You can help with code review, which reduces bugs, and over time has a wonderful side effect of making the code more readable and therefore more approachable. It's also a great way to teach and learn. Feel free to jump in! Be welcoming, appreciative, and helpful.

Please review these impeccable guidelines.

You can perform first reviews of simple changes, like badge additions. You can also review @paulmelnikow's changes, most of which are otherwise self-reviewed.

You can monitor issues and the chat room, and help other people who have questions about contributing to Shields, or using it for their projects.

Feel free to reach out to @paulmelnikow if you'd need help getting started.

Suggesting improvements

There are a lot of suggestions on file. You can help by weighing in on these suggestions, which helps convey community need to other contributors who might pick them up.

There is no need to post a new comment. Just add a 👍 or ❤️ to the top post.

If you have a suggestion of your own, search the open issues. If you don't see it, feel free to open a new issue.

Spreading the word

Feel free to star the repository. This will help increase the visibility of the project, therefore attracting more users and contributors to Shields!

We're also asking for one-time $10 donations from developers who use and love Shields, please spread the word!

Getting help

There are three places to get help:

1. If you're new to the project, a good place to start is the tutorial.
2. If you need help getting started or implementing a change, open an issue with your question. We promise it's okay to do that. If there is already an issue open for the feature you're working on, you can post there.
3. You can also join the chat room and ask your question there.

Badge guidelines

• The left-hand side of a badge should not advertize. It should be a noun succinctly describing the meaning of the right-hand side.
• Query parameters must be declared by the service. See request-handler.js.
• Except for badges using the social style, logos should be turned off by default.

Badge URLs

• The format of new badges should be of the form /SERVICE/NOUN/PARAMETERS/QUALIFIERS.format. For instance, /gitter/room/nwjs/nw.js.svg. The vendor is gitter, the badge is for rooms, the parameter is nwjs/nw.js, and the format is svg.
• For services which require a hostname, the badge should be of the form /SERVICE/SCHEME/HOST/NOUN/PARAMETERS/QUALIFIERS.format. For instance, /discourse/https/discourse.example.com/topics.svg.

Coding guidelines

Tests

When adding or changing a service please write tests.

When opening a pull request, include your service name in brackets in the pull request title. That way, those service tests will run in CI.

e.g. [Travis] Fix timeout issues

When changing other code, please add unit tests.

Code organization

Function declarations are placed in lib/, not directly in server.js.

Logos

Please minimize checked-in SVG files through SVGO. You can use svgomg. In general we only accept logos that have a corresponding badge on the homepage (e.g. the Eclipse logo because we support service badges for the Eclipse Marketplace), but we may also approve logos for tools widely used by developers (e.g. our Slack logo). We will happily consider all requests, but don't expect systematic approval, it's at the discretion of the maintainers.