If you're interested in contributing to CakePHP and supporting the community then we'd love for you to join us, there are a variety of ways to get involved and help out.

User Support¶ One of the greatest ways to contribute to CakePHP is by directly supporting the developer community. There's no need to be a genius or guru to get involved, you may just have the answer to some of the questions being asked. Here are some ways you can get started: Join the #cakephp IRC channel, or Slack group and talk to developers who need help. *

Answer questions on platforms such as StackOverflow and the official CakePHP Forum.

Comment on posts asking for help with a specific problem. * For those who don't have an IRC client we have a web-based client available here.

Education and Training¶ Helping others to learn CakePHP is another valuable way to contribute to the community. There are many ways you can help others, these include: Coding Seminars

Live Workshops

Hackathons

Training Courses

Tutorials

Q Additionally, we offer professional training for CakePHP. Sign up to our monthly training sessions sponsored by CakeDC.

Marketing and Evangelism¶ As an open source project, backed by the Cake Software Foundation, Inc. we don't have a massive budget to market and advertise the framework, so we depend on people like you getting involved and helping support the community. There are many actions which can help raise awareness, share experiences and educate your fellow developers about CakePHP. Write and Talk About CakePHP Actively writing and talking about CakePHP helps spread the word about the framework. Write an article or blog post about a certain feature or development experience.

Comment on articles or posts and provide ideas and arguments which invite further conversation and feedback.

Use social platforms such as Facebook, Discourse or Twitter to provide links to articles, posts, plugins, events, etc. Help Your Local Community We depend on people who know and understand their local community. This not only refers to the difference in the language, but also the local customs and cultural differences. You can help us by connecting with your local community and supporting CakePHP. A few actions you can undertake include: Starting or joining a local user group

Organizing events or meet-ups

Distributing information and awareness

Contributing Code¶ If you want to contribute code for a bug fix then coordinate your approach in the comments of the issue, either by linking to a gist/pastebin or by linking to the commit(s) for the fix. Contributing via a Pull Request Contributing via commits on a GitHub fork is the preferred way of submitting fixes. If your fix is more than a single commit, you should put the fix on an appropriately named branch. This makes integration of the fix easier.

Testing and Quality Assurance¶ Filing issues is a great way to start contributing to CakePHP. By finding and reporting issues in the code you notify the maintainers of any issues and help get them resolved. Issues for all CakePHP projects are located on GitHub Found a Bug? Sometimes there are problems in CakePHP. If you think you've come across one you can: Search for a similar or existing issues.

Create a new issue if you're sure it doesn't already exist OR update the existing issue.

Add detailed instructions on how to reproduce the bug. This could be in the form of test cases or a code snippet that demonstrates the issue. Not having a way to reproduce an issue, means its less likely to get fixed. Issues That Need Additional Information New issues often need to be confirmed or need more information. Asking for additional information on unclear issues doesn't take much time, and helps speed up the process. Confirm or Invalidate Existing Issues That Need a Way to Reproduce If an issue cannot be easily reproduced, or is unclear, it will be set to hold. Issues on hold generally need a way to be confirmed or require additional information. You can help by finding out ways to reproduce issues, or prodding issue authors for more information. Issues that are on hold can be found here Bug Issues for Maintenance Releases Existing releases usually have a few issues open against them. These issues generally need patches and test cases created for them, so they can be resolved. Preparing patches for open unresolved issues is a great way to get involved with CakePHP, and is one of the first steps to becoming a core contributor. Features and Enhancements for Future Releases We are currently working on the 4.x releases. There are still a number of incomplete tasks and unresolved defects. If an issue has been moved into a specific milestone, it is planned for inclusion in that release. Issues are moved into milestones based on community feedback and the core team's plans. If you plan on contributing a feature, please also include relevant test cases for the feature. We want to keep CakePHP as bug free as possible, and test cases have proven to help immensely. If you submit features without test cases, and no documentation it is highly unlikely it will be merged in. CakePHP is continuously integrated, so you can check the status of the various builds on the Jenkins server at any time.

Documentation¶ Documentation is another excellent way to start getting involved with CakePHP. We have two primary forms of documentation, the API and the Cookbook. The API is generated from the source code, so if you find an inaccuracy or issue with the API documentation, you can file a patch against the source code. The Cookbook is a community managed documentation source which can also be found on GitHub. Guidelines on contributing to the documentation can be reviewed here.