1. Start
  2. Documentation overview
  3. Contributing / Support

Contributing

You want to spread the word about Serendipity? See how you can give back to the community? Want to dive into code, create your own plugins or themes? As an actively maintained open source project we welcome all kinds of users and developers.

Discussion/feature requests

You want to simply talk about Serendipity, have a pet peeve, a suggestion or a specific feature in mind you don’t know how to achieve? Our forums are the best place to go to. Most of our developers hang out there and can give you valuable insight - given that you take the time to properly describe what you want. Also, please first always read the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) to see if your issue is covered there.

Feature requests are not to be entered into our issue tracker on Github; we first discuss them in the forums, and when it is agreed and the specifics are clear, our developers will enter it as a issue on the tracker.

Bug reports

Found a bug? If you can describe what happens, please file a bug report in the GitHub issue tracker. If you found multiple bugs, please only address one single bug per issue. GitHub issues are to be reported in english language.

(If the issue tracker looks too complicated, feel free to report bugs on our Forums.)

Security Reports, Exploits

We kindly ask you to send security reports via e-mail to our maintainer Garvin Hicking so that we can address issues and coordinate a responsible disclosure. The team will give proper credits for all issues reported. We usually react within 24 hours to talk about further proceedings.

If you prefer, you can open a generic github issue about security and provide information on how to get in touch with you. Please do not mention specifics about the issue in the public!

Development

Want to actually code something with or for Serendipity? Great. Here’s what you need:

  • clone our repository on GitHub, develop your code and contribute a pull request
  • please have a look at and try to follow our Github documentation for using branches, version numbering, release policy and documenting changes
  • if you submit multiple requests, we’ll happily hand out direct repository access
  • code documentation primer for the Serendipity API
  • contribute themes or plugins either with GitHub pull requests or announce them in the forums
  • if you like, your theme or plugin can be added to Spartacus after the team has run basic security checks and code reviews
  • we object to having multiple plugins for same task, so please add new features to existing plugins where applicable

New to s9y development, want to know where and how to get started? We have a list of issues that should be easy to fix for new contributors.

Commercial Serendipity support

Serendipity’s Core Developer Garvin Hicking works at the german web-design/multimedia agency Faktor E (Bonn). His company offers commercial support for all needs touching Serendipity’s featureset.

We need your help!

We really need your help in improving Serendipity. Currently there’s demand for people who:

  • report and write about Serendipity or participate in discussions in the forums
  • design new themes or help improving existing designs
  • contribute to and improve our documentation
  • develop new features, or new plugins
  • translate documentation or our frontend/backend (we natively support German and English; there’s a lot of basic language support which needs updating)
  • work with QA or UX/UI to help us continuously improve our frontend and backend

Not only will we benefit from a larger user base, here’s what you get in return:

  • Get experience working in an open source team, have fun working on things together and see how you can positively affect people around the world!
  • Make an actual impact in an open source application. Serendipity is open for new ideas and offers a great place to get your word out. We have a flat hierarchy and embrace everyone’s input.
  • It’s a great way for learning PHP, both by reading and writing code with a simple learning curve. Serendipity is easy to get into, there are no overly complex workflows.