It’s October! And that means we’re celebrating Hacktoberfest for the 6th year in a row!
You can have an impact on Umbraco in many different ways, this year more than ever before - so bear with us, and feel free to jump straight to what interests you most. We have a list of repositories in the Umbraco organization for which contributions make you eligible for both DigitalOcean’s Hacktoberfest rewards AND Umbraco’s Hacktoberfest rewards.
One key change this year to be aware of is that 2 eligible contributions are needed to earn the exclusive Umbraco Hacktoberfest swag. More on this below.
Don’t forget to join us on Discord at https://discord.gg/umbraco to chat and collaborate with other Umbraco devs!
Jump down to see how to contribute to Hacktoberfest this year
Hacktoberfest is DigitalOcean’s annual event that encourages people to contribute to open source throughout October. Umbraco has joined in on the Hacktoberfest fun for the last 5 years (with our own addition to the Digital Ocean rewards) because your input and contributions help shape the Umbraco CMS, documentation and our other projects - in fact we rely quite heavily on them!
This year, we’ve added even more new ways that you can contribute, including low/no-code contributions (more info in the contribution guide)!
If you ask us, there are many good reasons why you should contribute to an open-source project - and we can think of even more for contributing to Umbraco 😉
Here’s why you should contribute:
So, time to get your contribution hats on!
Jump to...
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The reason why we’re all here (right!?): the Umbraco CMS!
As always, there are plenty of up-for-grabs issues to look at - a great starting point if you’re not sure quite where to start.!
We’re also happy for you to work on translations or other problems you might know of that are not on the issue tracker yet.
Here are a few focus areas that we’d love some help with this year:
Umbraco prides itself on being pretty accessible for people working in the backoffice, but… it can always be better! The Umbraco Accessibility Team has recently ran a scan and found plenty of issues to work on.
We have an overarching issue on the CMS issue tracker that describes exactly how you can help. Be it missing links, illogical tab orders, call to actions not having appropriate text. Plenty of things to work on and items in the “Ready” column of the linked project board should have enough guidance for you to get started.
For the past year, we have been running an acceptance test suite to make sure that any updates to the Umbraco backoffice UI / UX don’t break functionality. These tests were written in Cypress, but we’ve recently migrated them to the new snazzy kid on the block: Playwright. Playwright makes it easier to run the test suite in our continuous integration pipeline, and is faster and more developer friendly.
In addition to the actual tests that can be contributed to, we have two other repositories that provide Models for Playwright tests and some Testhelpers. Both of those are also great to contribute to!
The Umbraco UI Library is described as “a collection of user interface components that can be used to build Umbraco style interfaces.”
The UI library is the basis of the new backoffice we’re building, and its inclusion in the old backoffice means that, for example, package developers can start using it to move UI elements in their packages over to the new UI library components.
We have a couple of up-for-grabs issues ready for people to contribute to and documentation on how to contribute as well. Now that we’re shipping with the UI library in Umbraco 10, we expect to add more issues soon which can be contributed to.
Please note: this is interesting for package developers too, so if you are a(n aspiring) package dev, skip to the “Packages” heading in this blog post.
Feel like joining Hacktoberfest, but don’t feel like writing code? You’re in luck! Contributions to the Umbraco Documentation are also part of the Hacktoberfest this year and we have identified some tasks that would be a perfect fit - we hope! 🤞🏻
First off there’s a lot of documentation, and it’s not always easy to keep it updated or know if we covered all the details you need to know to follow them. We would love for your help to verify documentation. That is, to follow the docs to the letter and see if you’re successful or missing anything.
If you find some of the documentation lacking then we reward 2 actions: a report of where you got stuck, or, even better, a pull request to help everyone get “unstuck” (also see the section around “low-code / no-code contributions later on in this blog post).
We have recently updated our style guide to ensure a better reading experience when visiting our documentation. The style guide was something we initially introduced back in 2019 with a handful of ‘rules’ (or guidelines, really) that work to ensure that (for example):
Right now, we have 9 different rules defined in total, each of which helps to ensure that reading articles in the Umbraco Documentation is a joy! However as these rules are a fairly new edition, there are quite a lot of articles in the documentation that do not currently comply with them - that’s where we hope you might come in!
Where to start? We’ve divided the docs into some more edible sections - ripe for picking 🌳
Find detailed instructions on how to fork and clone the Umbraco Documentation on GitHub - or find it directly in the documentation on Our, in the Contribute section. Here, we have outlined the steps involved with testing and checking the articles against our style guide. In the same article, you can also learn much more about the rules we’re checking the docs against.
Tip: The best way to start helping with identifying where “rules are broken”, we recommend that you install a tool called Vale on your local machine and use that along with an extension to Visual Studio code to run checks on a fork of the UmbracoDocs repository.
Tip tip: your PR will definitely get prioritized when it's changing less than about 5 files at a time, which makes it nice and easy to scan and merge the changes. So we recommend working in small chunks, also to give everyone the opportunity to dive in. It’s no fun if just one person corrects all of the Vale errors in one go, sharing is caring. 💙
For the third year in a row, packages are back on the menu - and yes, they also count as a contribution to Umbraco!
Here are some specific details on this:
Please note: Package contributions eligibility for swag differs slightly from those used for all contributions. Read more on the Packages Hacktoberfest guidelines to learn more about how a contribution is marked as “swag-eligible”.
For the first time ever, publishing a brand new package to Our Umbraco will also count towards both DigitalOcean’s and Umbraco’s Hacktoberfest contributions ⭐🤩
For guidance on how to get started with building packages, make sure to have a look at our extensive documentation on the subject.
If you need inspiration for a package, check out Lee Kelleher’s list of potential new package ideas! This is also a great repository to add your own ideas to, in case you have wishes but are not sure on how to implement them as a package.
For the first time this year, by popular request, we will also be rewarding contributions that are either low-code and more importantly: no-code!
Eligible contributions according to the Hacktoberfest guidelines include:
We have set up a special GitHub repository called the Hacktoberfest Activity Log for you to record your contributions that are NOT a pull request i.e. from the list above. Please edit the README.md file and add your activity at the end in the recommended format and submit that as a pull request. We’ll take it from there!
You bet! We will again this year be handing out swag to anyone who participates in Hacktoberfest by contributing to any of the open-source Umbraco repositories and packages 👏👕
Also like last year, you can choose between swag or planting a tree as your reward.
Here’s how it works:
More information about delivery, shipping, and planting will be available once Hacktoberfest (and October) is over, and we’ve got an overview of all of the Hacktoberfest contributions. As a “rule of thumb”, brace yourself with some patience - you might get your swag closer to the holidays 😉
Whereas DigitalOcean requires 4 contributions to participate in Hacktoberfest, here at Umbraco you qualify after just 2 accepted contributions.
We use the Hacktoberfest participation rules to qualify, so any contributions that do not follow these standards will also not count towards Umbraco swag. These rules are to ensure we get quality contributions and that the right efforts get rewarded 🙌
If you’re contributing to one of the open-source Umbraco Packages, please check the Packages Hacktoberfest guidelines to learn more about how a contribution is marked as “swag-eligible”.
We gather on Discord every Thursday to cover an area of contribution to Umbraco. We’re still planning the exact events but we have Nikolaj L. and Nikolaj G. lined up to show us how to work with Playwright, and we have someone from the Umbraco UI team ready to show more about Web Components and working with / contributing to the Umbraco UI library.
Make sure to join the Umbraco Discord to get updates about these events.
This hackathon will be a relaxed environment for people to share ideas, seek inspiration, get guidance, find collaborators, or just have some company whilst hacking away...
We are planning to start at 13:00 CEST on the Friday, and then again at 10:00 CEST on the Saturday. When we finish each day will depend on how long you all want to stay!
To help you succeed, we at HQ are trying to be available as much as possible during the month of October on our new Discord server in the #hacktoberfest channel. Whether you need some inspiration, guidance, help getting things to build, and so on - we’re there to support and guide you, together with the Core Collaborators team.
So come join us and the other 850+ people already on the Umbraco Discord server at: https://discord.gg/umbraco!
Let's take a look back on this year's fantastic Hacktoberfest! From Umbraco 9 improvements, to Cypress tests, UX and UI revamps and lots of package PRs. There are lots of high-fives to be given, so let's get straight to it.