Contributing to Django
Django is a community that lives on its volunteers. As it keeps growing, we always need more people to help others. You can contribute in many ways, either on the framework itself or in the wider ecosystem.
Communication channels
We’re passionate about helping Django users make the jump to contributing members of the community. Communication is key - working on Django is being part of a conversation. Join it, to become familiar with what we’re doing and how we talk about it. You’ll be able to form relationships with more experienced contributors who are there to help guide you towards success.
Join the Django community
There are several ways you can help the Django community and others to maintain a great ecosystem to work in:
- Join the Django forum. This forum is a place for discussing the Django framework and applications and projects that use it. This is also a good place to ask and answer any questions related to installing, using, or contributing to Django.
- Join the django-users mailing list and answer questions. This mailing list has a huge audience, and we really want to maintain a friendly and helpful atmosphere. If you’re new to the Django community, you should read the posting guidelines.
- Join the Django Discord server or the #django IRC channel on Libera.Chat to discuss and answer questions. By explaining Django to other users, you’re going to learn a lot about the framework yourself.
- Blog about Django. We syndicate all the Django blogs we know about on the community page; if you’d like to see your blog on that page you can register it here.
- Contribute to open-source Django projects, write some documentation, or release your own code as an open-source pluggable application. The ecosystem of pluggable applications is a big strength of Django, help us build it!
Getting started
Django encourages and welcomes new contributors, and makes an effort to help them become experienced, confident contributors to Open Source Software (OSS). Our documentation contains guidance for first-time contributors, including:
Work on the Django framework
If you enjoy working with Django, wait until you start working on it. Really, anyone can do something to improve Django, which will improve the experience of lots of people!
The work on Django itself falls into three major areas:
Contributing code
Fix a bug, or add a new feature. You can make a pull request and see your code in the next version of Django.
Contributing documentation
Django’s documentation is one of its key strengths. It’s informative and thorough. You can help to improve the documentation and keep it relevant as the framework evolves.
- Writing documentation
- The Django documentation process
- How the documentation is organized
- How to start contributing documentation
- Writing style
- Commonly used terms
- Django-specific terminology
- Guidelines for reStructuredText files
- Django-specific markup
- Documenting new features
- Minimizing images
- An example
- Translating documentation
- django-admin man page
Localizing Django
Django is translated into over 100 languages - There’s even some translation for Klingon?! The i18n team is always looking for translators to help maintain and increase language reach.
Other ways of contributing
Explore additional avenues of contributing to Django beyond coding. Django’s ticket tracker is the central hub for managing issues, improvements, and contributions to Django. It’s a valuable resource where you can report bugs you encounter or assist in triaging existing tickets to ensure a smooth development workflow. Explore the ways you can make a difference below, and join us in making Django better for everyone.
We’re looking forward to working with you. Welcome aboard!