How You Can Help

Talk to Us

Members of the Help Viewer Project often hang around in the #documentation channel on the mozilla.org IRC server. (If you're using SeaMonkey, clicking on the link should take you to the channel. If you're running Firefox, Chatzilla is the easiest way to get onto IRC.) While you won't always find people talking, there's usually a decent supply of people just hanging around. Ask questions — if we can help you help us, we will!

For offline discussion, use the mozilla.dev.documentation newsgroup.

Write Help Documents

Take your pick from among the following applications:

Firefox

We've managed to ship each of the past releases of Firefox with up-to-date documentation. But there are still topics we haven't documented at all, for example Bookmarks and Live Bookmarks, or Page Info. The bugs page has links for searching for existing and filing new bugs.

Thunderbird

Thunderbird Help is still in an early stage. The documentation effort is taking place at the Thunderbird Help section of the Mozilla wiki. Please have a look and make your contributions. It's a wiki, so go ahead and make changes — you don't need to ask permission first.

Calendar/Sunbird

A separate project for this exists at the calendarhelp project on Mozdev. You should check there to see what's needed and how you can help.

SeaMonkey

Check in #documentation to see what needs to be done.

Hack the Help Viewer

Since SeaMonkey has moved to Toolkit on trunk, it is using the same Help Viewer as Firefox. It's pretty stable, but it's got its bugs. View the current list of Help Viewer bugs, make a note saying you plan to work on it in the bug, and get started.

Do I Need to Know a Programming Language?

Absolutely not! Much of what we do consists of writing documentation, and while what we write is eventually turned into HTML, there's no reason we won't accept help simply because it's not in the correct format. We'd prefer something that's easy to parse, however — if HTML isn't your thing, regular *.txt files are probably next best.

You can also help with quality assurance for our documentation — just pick up a build of your favorite application and look for things you don't like or that you don't think are good enough. Finally, if you think you might want to do something else related to Help, just swing by IRC and hopefully someone can give you some pointers.

What Would Be Good to Know? (To Write Documentation)

Well, the first thing that would be good to know is how to get the current documentation in the source code tree. To do so you'll need the cvs program. If you're on Linux, cvs is probably on the install disks for your distribution or is available in convenient package form for download. If you're not, do a Google search for it — it's not difficult to find. Once you have cvs installed on your system so that it can be run with the command cvs, run:

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs-mirror.mozilla.org:/cvsroot co mozilla/browser/locales/en-US/chrome/help mozilla/suite/locales/en-US/chrome/common/help

...to get the latest source code. You'll want to run this command to update your source code in the future.

Another good place to look is the content pack specification. This document describes exactly how applications create help content for display by the Help viewer, and it describes things in pretty good detail. You'll want to know how these things work so that you add entries to the index, table of contents, and glossary for whichever application's Help you want to hack.

Beyond that, there's not much else. Learn HTML, grasp the basics of the formats for the table of contents, index, and glossary, and start making changes with your favorite text editor.

What Would Be Good to Know? (To Hack the Help Viewer)

First, see the previous answer. You'll also need to look at the Build Instructions, because you'll be building some application in order to test that your fixes work correctly. (This will involve getting a few more build tools beyond just cvs.) Beyond that, you'll be looking at code in either extensions/help or toolkit/components/help. From there, it's mostly up to you until we get some better documentation here or link to it. Learn XUL, CSS, and JavaScript as it's used in Help. It's more up to you at this point, because that's the best way to get people who are committed to helping us. (See also #documentation if you need further tips — at least until we get more docs here.)