There are many ways to contribute to Pelican. You can enhance the documentation, add missing features, and fix bugs (or just report them).
Don’t hesitate to fork and make a pull request on GitHub. When doing so, please create a new feature branch as opposed to making your commits in the master branch.
You’re free to set up your development environment any way you like. Here is a way using the virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper tools. If you don’t have them, you can install these both of these packages via:
$ pip install virtualenvwrapper
Virtual environments allow you to work on Python projects which are isolated from one another so you can use different packages (and package versions) with different projects.
To create a virtual environment, use the following syntax:
$ mkvirtualenv pelican
To clone the Pelican source:
$ git clone https://github.com/getpelican/pelican.git src/pelican
To install the development dependencies:
$ cd src/pelican
$ pip install -r dev_requirements.txt
To install Pelican and its dependencies:
$ python setup.py develop
Each time you add a feature, there are two things to do regarding tests: checking that the existing tests pass, and adding tests for the new feature or bugfix.
The tests live in “pelican/tests” and you can run them using the “discover” feature of unittest2:
$ unit2 discover
If you have made changes that affect the output of a Pelican-generated weblog, then you should update the output used by functional tests. To do so, you can use the following two commands:
$ LC_ALL="C" pelican -o tests/output/custom/ -s samples/pelican.conf.py \
samples/content/
$ LC_ALL="C" pelican -o tests/output/basic/ samples/content/
Try to respect what is described in the PEP8 specification when providing patches. This can be eased via the pep8 or flake8 tools, the latter of which in particular will give you some useful hints about ways in which the code/formatting can be improved.