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Hacktoberfest - Pull Request #1 : RawCMS Documentation

In my previous post, I announced my participation in this year's Hacktoberfest event and explained the event along with my goals to succeed in it. Be sure to check out the post if you haven't already, it will provide some context for this one. This post will detail my successful first pull request to the RawCMS project along with some information about the project itself. I will also include my next steps to progress as an open-source contributor.  The pull request was reviewed and approved by the project creator, and I was invited to continue contributing to the project by the creator.

RawCMS

CMS stands for Content Management System, and as it's name suggests, it's simply a tool to allow website owners to manage the content of their site without having to hard-code the content into the HTML code of the site. RawCMS is a 'headless' CMS, meaning it allows the user to manage the content of the site by storing it all on a MongoDB based backend, and then the content can be plugged into any or multiple front-ends that user wishes. The documentation describes it as, "a headless CMS written in asp.net core build for developers that embrace API first technology."

This caught my interest because in my earlier days, before even starting my post-secondary education, I had worked with a popular CMS known as a Wordpress. While it wasn't a headless CMS, I was curious to see how a headless one like RawCMS would benefit a developer with front-end experience such as myself. This led me to continue reading their documentation, and this is where I encountered the issue I ended up raising.

The Issue - Poor Syntax in Documentation

 As I was reading the ReadMe file to familiarize myself with the project, I came across several spelling mistakes and grammar issues that made it somewhat painful to read. These issues not only compromise the reader's experience, but can also hinder the reader's comprehension of the information the documentation wants to convey. My guess was that the creator of this project is not a native English speaker, so I felt like my proficiency in English can definitely help improve the documentation. I took it upon myself to create an issue regarding the spelling and grammar mistakes.

The Enhancement

 After forking the repo, I began enhancing the documentation. This involved correcting the spelling mistakes and restructuring some of the sentences to improve clarity and precision. I also replaced some awkwardly worded phrases.

Screenshot of Corrections #1

The Pull Request 

 After completing the enhancements and corrections, I created a pull request to merge my "fixedReadMe" branch with the master branch of the original repo. After roughly one day, my changes were reviewed, approved and merged. I also received a positive message from the project creator encouraging me to continue contributing to the project.

The Next Steps

As a novice, my plan was to ease myself into open source. It's safe to say I did exactly that, since the difficulty of the project was not too high. I simply leveraged my proficiency of the English language to contribute to a project's documentation. My next steps are to actually add some functionality to a project, which would involve a process of familiarizing myself with the code to a certain extent before being able to contribute.

I'm eager to take my next steps and progress as an open-source contributor. 

Stay tuned for the next pull request in about one week!

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