For those of you who know what it’s all about:
No need for further explanation - jump straight into the repositories and get hacking:
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.
Don’t forget to join us on Discord at https://discord.umbraco.com to chat and collaborate with other Umbraco devs!
>Jump down to the Hacktoberfest contribution guide<
What the ‘hack’ is Hacktoberfest?
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 6 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!
Why contribute to an open-source project?
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:
- You expand your skill set
- You give your career a bit of a boost (don’t tell your boss, but this becomes part of your public resumé)
- You will build or expand your network - you get to talk to Umbraco community members and HQ and it‘s good to get to know people!
- You’ll learn things you never knew, you’ll unlearn things you never knew you should
- Your contribution will impact thousands of people. How would you like to say ‘Oh yeah, that bug... I helped fix that’ 😎
- You’ll get your hands on some sweet Swag, or plant a tree in your name 🌳
- You help the hundreds of thousands of other Umbraco users!
- You can give back to the software that you enjoy using everyday…or fix something you’ve always been annoyed about 😉
So, time to get your contribution hat on!
Here’s how to contribute
Umbraco CMS
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 quite sure 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:
Accessibility
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 or CTA (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.
Playwright
For the past few years, 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 Playwright.
Playwright makes it easier to run the test suite in our continuous integration pipeline, is faster and more developer-friendly.
In addition to the actual tests that can be added to, we have two other repositories that provide Models for Playwright tests and some Testhelpers. Both of those are great to contribute to.
Umbraco UI library
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 (also known as project Bellissima) 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.
As noted, 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.
Documentation
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! 🤞🏻
Verify documentation
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 your help to verify the 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).
Find detailed instructions on how to contribute to the docs directly in the documentation site. 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. 💙
Packages
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:
- Only contributions made to open-source Umbraco packages added to the Hacktoberfest Package repo list counts
- Follow the contribution guidelines provided by the package creator
- Look for the “help wanted” label on the issue tracker associated with the package you want to help out with
- Read much more about how this works, and guidelines on adding your own package repo to the list on the Umbraco Packages Hacktoberfest homepage.
Please note: Package contributions eligibility for swag differ 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”.
Creating a brand-new package
Publishing a brand new package to the Umbraco Marketplace will also count towards both DigitalOcean’s and Umbraco’s Hacktoberfest contributions ⭐🤩
Packages for Umbraco 14, also known as Bellissima, are eligible by default, even if the equivalent package already exists for Umbraco 12.
Check out Lee Kelleher’s list of potential new package ideas!
Low-code / no-code contributions
Back, by popular demand, we will also be rewarding contributions that are either low-code and more importantly: no-code!
Eligible contributions according to the Hacktoberfest guidelines include:
- Verifying documentation
- Copy editing
- User experience testing
- Talks or presentations
- Blog posts
- Podcasts
- Case studies
- Organizing Hacktoberfest events
We have set up a special GitHub repository for you to record your contributions that are NOT a pull request.
In order to record your journey of verifying documentation (i.e. related blog post(s) in October, events organized), 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!
New! Sponsor an Umbraco-related GitHub repository
To appreciate people who maintain open-source projects for the Umbraco ecosystem, an easy way to help contribute is to give them some money! We’d suggest you have a look at your favorite packages and see if their repo/maintainer is accepting sponsorship.
We suggest you scroll through the list of topics on GitHub, filtered by Umbraco, and see if your favorite packages/authors are open to sponsorship. Look for the heart icon.
If you’re in doubt if your chosen sponsorship would count, then feel free to first create an issue on the Hacktoberfest Activity Log repository, or ask on Discord in the #contributing channel.
Umbraco HQ sponsors 4 different projects at the moment, at $100 per month. These are excellent projects that could always use more sponsorships, but make sure to also consider other repositories, there are many great ones out there!
And the good news is: yes, you will be able to earn Umbraco swag, proportionate to your sponsorship amount.
The big question: will there be swag?
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 will be able to choose between swag or planting a tree as your reward.
Here’s how it works:
- First of all, you’ll need to complete the Umbraco Hacktoberfest challenge: Have at least 1 contribution approved on any Umbraco repository or Umbraco Package repository or on the Hacktoberfest Activity Log.
- You’ve contributed, woo! We will review it and decide whether you’re eligible for some swag (we’ll talk about eligibility in a second).
- Your contribution is approved for swag! We’ll add the “hacktoberfest/contrib-2023” label to it 🎉
- Once Hacktoberfest is over and you’ve completed the Hacktoberfest challenge, you will have a choice to make:
👕 I want an exclusive Umbraco Hacktoberfest t-shirt
🌳 I want to help the climate by having trees planted
More information about delivery, shipping, and planting will be available once 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 😉
How we judge a Hacktoberfest-eligible contribution
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”.
Events
October 3, 2023
In-person: The Copenhagen Umbraco Hackathon, organized by our friends at Knowit is a great way to kick off Hacktoberfest in collaboration with people from HQ who are around to help you when you get stuck. This is also in part a “regular” meetup with 2 talks:
- 15:30-16:15 Niels Lyngsø from Umbraco will give a talk titled Mounting your UI in New Backoffice
- 16:30-17:45 Kenn Jacobsen from Umbraco HQ will join us and talk about: Connecting the Umbraco delivery API to a frontend
Both talks should serve as inspiration for contributions during the rest of the day.
October 3, 2023
In-person: The US Community Hackathon in Charlotte, NC. This hackathon is the lead-up to the Umbraco US Summit Community event.
This event neatly overlaps with the Copenhagen one above and we’ll open a video link between the two locations 📹📺
October 14, 2023
The Umbraco x Candid Contributions Hacktoberfest Hackathon: This online 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 10:00 CEST and we have a “soft” end time at 8:00 PM CEST. Iif people still want to keep going after that, we’ll make it happen.
Any questions?
In order to help you succeed we at HQ are trying to be available as much as possible during the month of October on Discord in the #contributing 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 1500+ people already on the Umbraco Discord server at: https://discord.umbraco.com!
Happy Hacktoberfest! 🎃
