riscky wrote: > How does one go about checking out a webpage to edit to make a patch... > or what ever needs to be doing to fix a problem with a mozilla.org page? > > I assume this is the best place to ask such a question.
This is. I'm actually working on a draft document to explain how to go about that as we speak. Short form: (1) Go to Bugzilla, see if anyone's working on the page recently. (2) If so, e-mail that person, asking how you can help. (3) If not, you probably want to file a bug against Documentation, assigned to yourself. (4) Of course, you need to grab a copy of the file (okay, maybe CVS checkout is necessary for server-processed code, but most of our pages are static HTML), and edit it appropriately. We in documentation do *not* recommend you use Mozilla Editor/Composer to do that. I personally use Amaya from the W3C and a text editor; other people use other tools to edit the code as needed. (5) If you're going to do an edit, especially if it's a major edit, I strongly recommend you edit the document to conform to our Style Guide (http://moz.zope.org/contribute/writing/guide is our latest version). For minor tweaks, we may not require it (the jury's still out on that), but for major overhauls, it's usually best to go for conformance. (6) For making the file available to us, you have two options (and I personally recommend you do both). First, upload the changed version -- preferably to moz.zope.org (m.z.o), or to the Bugzilla bug as an attachment (we don't necessarily recommend this). If you are going to upload it to m.z.o, ask in the #documentation IRC channel or the newsgroup where to put it, and the people who actually maintain m.z.o will help you. (We'll probably also file comments on the document itself, using m.z.o.) Second, if you can, create a diff'd patch between the current documentation page and your new version, which you should attach to the Bugzilla bug. We can then do the appropriate review marking there as needed, and check in from there. Most importantly, keep a copy of your changed document. You may need it to make changes without the annotations that m.z.o supports. We have not yet decided all the particulars to m.z.o versus mozilla.org for hosting documentation; the above is based on what we currently do for documentation hosted on mozilla.org, and may be subject to change. (But I want to emphasize we do not anticipate moving most mozilla.org documentation to m.z.o.) Hope this helps -- and I'm in #documentation most of the day today for responses and gripes. :) Alex "WeirdAl" Vincent
