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Getting Started
Thank you for volunteering your time to help write documentation for Nova! It means a great deal to me as well as the community. One of the most crucial things we can do for the community is provide robust documentation about how to get the most out of Nova.
We want the documentation we write to be thorough and easy-to-understand. There's no silver bullet here. Sometimes it will take several drafts to get something right, but everyone involved in this effort is here to help if you need a second (or third) pair of eyes on something.
Everything we write for the documentation is done right here on GitHub. This provides members of the community with the opportunity to contribute documentation if they want and provided version control out of the box.
Since this is the medium we've chosen to use, there are a few things that need to be done to get up and running.
Unless you're comfortable using Git on the command line, the easiest way to get up and running is with a Git client like GitHub Desktop or GitKraken. Using those, you can easily pull, commit, and push updates to the repository.
The simplest way to edit Markdown files is with a good text editor. We recommend either VS Code or Atom.
Since Atom is built by GitHub they've included GitHub integration out of the box. That makes it very easy to get up and running with Atom without needing extra tools like a Git client. There are ways to get GitHub working seamlessly with VS Code, but it may just be easier to use Atom for work on this project.
The documentation contained in this repository is only the raw files. These files are pulled into the Anodyne site during deployment so they can be parsed and displayed. As such, you won't actually be able to preview all of the documentation in the site itself. If things look good in a Markdown preview, they should be fine in the site.
There are branches for each version of Nova. When you're writing documentation, ensure you're on the correct branch before committing and pushing updates.
Since there are multiple people working in this repository, it's important to make sure you're pulling the latest down from a branch before you start writing to ensure you have all the latest work and that you're not causing merge conflicts down the road.
You can write as you normally would, keeping all guidelines in mind as you do.
Once you've finished working on a page, you can commit that work. In order to do so, you'll need to stage the files you want to commit and then provide a commit message. This should be a clear and concise message about what this particular commit has in it. For example, if you're working on a long page, you might commit after you've finished each section and write a commit message that explains what section you wrote. You can also choose to wait until the end if you want.
You can commit as many times as you want. Those changes will all stay on your local machine until you push the changes up to the repository. In much the same way as you pulled earlier, you can take the reverse action and push back up to the server from the same menu.
Important: Unless specified by the admin, you should NEVER force push to the repository.