I wanna contribute but don't know Git!!!

Figuring out how to actually contribute to open source is a nightmare if you haven't already gotten to grips with Github/Git, as I figured out.

There are many ways in which to use both, the abundance of terminology, ways in which to contribute etc makes it rather confusing to start with. So I'm going to attempt to make a guide to contributing that's as ridiculously fun and simple as I can possibly make it.

First off, if you haven't made a Github account go ahead and create one, the free one is fine

You'll want to make a copy of the project you want to contribute to by going to the main project page, in this case Group repo GlasgowCoderCollective/glasgowcodercollective.github.io

The forked project now under your name ie yourname/demoproject is a copy of the original for you to play with, make changes to and if you have changes that you want the original project to have, you submit a pull request, but that's getting ahead of ourselves. The fork you made is kept on Github and although you can change the code directly on Github it's not best practice, for personal projects perhaps but for contributing to projects you'll want to clone/download the forked repo.

Your head is probably starting to hurt thinking "wtf" but stick with me!

If you're coding you have an editor of some sort, be it Atom, Notepad++, VisualStudio... You want the editor so you can code, let's pretend we're going to add some

tags and content to the forked project, if we're not supposed to edit directly on Github (the editor is basic so you wouldn't want to do much anyway) then what we need is a copy on our computer and it's here that we'll clone the fork you made (you could download but cloning is the better option)

Click the green clone button and copy the url it'll give you, you're going to paste it into the terminal, and hit enter

Summary so far:

Click fork on the GlasgowCoderCollective/glasgowcodercollective.github.io repo

You'll have a copy on youraccount/glasgowcodercollective.github.io

On the original GlasgowCoderCollective/glasgowcodercollective.github.io, click the clone button Copy the url that appears Paste it in the terminal and hit enter

There'll be a bunch of stuff appearing as the project is cloned onto your computer, your very own local copy should now be ready to play with!!