Lowering the barrier to contribution

[ariya]

This is related to #13861 and #14541.

There are many different ways to contribute to PhantomJS: fix a defect, propose an enhancement, triage issues, write documentation, help setting up infrastructure, or even fund someone to work on PhantomJS.

If you would like to contribute to PhantomJS but you haven't done that yet, please let us know why. Even better if we can start the discussion on how to lower those barriers.

[zackw]

I'm in what I earnestly hope is the home stretch of my PhD ... which means I'm probably not going to be around much at all for the next year or so. :-/

I have two immediate suggestions: (1) put discuss.phantomjs.org on the homepage, possibly replacing the link to the mailing list; (2) finish up the troubleshooting guide I wrote back in February and put that on the main website, too.

[jesg]

my use case

i use phantomjs to run automated selenium tests on linux. the 2.1.1 upgrade was rough i ended up applying d0388371cfda166d97165c1b68182857b954cc83 (cookie fix) plus a full ugrade to the selenium atoms in ghostdriver. the docker build was useful when putting this together.

for me learning how to build the project from source took the longest. the project does not always build from source on linux which can be frustrating. (1) stable reproducible build.

ghostdriver has not been updated in phantomjs for 2 years. i understand that the contributors don't have the time to integrate changes from ghostdriver upstream. though it would be nice if there was a streamlined flow to getting ghostdriver changes into phantomjs. (2) integrate changes from ghostdriver

that said i would be interested in contributing changes to ghostdriver. let me know if there is any way i can contribute.

[JamieMcNaught]

I'd like to contribute / help, but I can't currently build master on Ubuntu 14.04 - it seems to need QT5.6 to build, but won't work without QTwebkit but QT 5.6 includes QTWebEngine - at which point I get confused. I've looked thought many bugs, wiki pages, etc.

To start helping, I need to be able to build it.

[gsouf]

@ariya I setup a slack chanel: https://phantomjs.slack.com/

It would be awesome to promote it on the website homepage (imo it can replace mailing list because people get more and more used to work with instant chat instead of email lists) let me now your opinion

[thoop]

@gsouf don't you have to manually invite people to a slack channel? I think that would make a slack channel less useful here.

[gsouf]

@thoop No, everyone should be allowed to join, that just requiring they give an email and a password for the first connection. If you like something more open, we might try gitter instead

[jakehm]

Use a 'good first bugs' label.

[brainwane]

For something a bit more open, Zulip would work.

[vitallium]

I will create something like https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nodejs/node/master/tools/bootstrap/windows_boxstarter for setting up the development environment on Windows.