Introduction

There are several ways in which you can help Liferay depending on your capabilities. Some examples are:

• Write documentation of some feature that you know in the wiki
• Test it and file the bugs you find
• Implement a new feature or extend the existing ones
• Suggest a new feature

The next section gives more information about each of these

Write documentation

Liferay has both an official documentation and a community based documentation created through a wiki (right where this page is).

If you feel that there are some details that need documentation or you feel that some of the existing documentation is insufficient, use this wiki. Here are specific instructions on what you can do here:

• Liferay Editorial Guidelines
• How to Create a new article

For more information go to the LiferayPedia:Community Portal

Contribute with new features

1. Make sure the feature does not exist
2. Comment the feature in the message boards to let other people give their opinion about it
3. Download Liferay's latest sources and make the changes there
4. Go to the support website and add an issue explaining your feature
5. Create a patch for your changes and upload it as an attachment to the issue you created
   1. Make sure it satisfies Liferay's guidelines: Liferay Core Development Guidelines
   2. It must always be done against latest trunk (specify the revision in the patch comment)
   3. The patch should be created with the patch utility to include only differences
   4. Don't include differences for files that are generated with ServiceBuilder
   5. The name of the file must be of the form: LEP-nnnn-build-mmmmmm.patch Where nnnn is the number associated to the JIRA issue and mmmmm is the subversion revision against which the patch was created
6. Once you are done click "Resolve issue". Do not "close it", just "resolve it".

Some tips:

• It's much easier for Liferay's developers to receive several small patches than a huge one, because the latter takes more time to review.
• Follow the conventions of the existing code as strictly as you can: pay attention to class names, variable names and all the coding style.
• If you are planning to develop a large feature or send a set of related patches it's a good idea to write down the whole proposal as a wiki article within the Proposed Projects section

Notify a bug

1. Make sure it really is a bug
   1. Post the problem in the message boards
2. Go to the support website and add an issue explaining the bug
   1. Try to explain the way Liferay works and the way it should work in a very detailed way.
3. If you have the knowledge create a patch that solves the bug

Suggest a new feature

1. Go to the message boards and suggest the feature in the Suggestions and Feature Requests Category.
2. If the community likes it, once it's defined it will be added to this wiki under the Proposed Projects page.