There is no “secret sauce” in ERPNext - I am sure all of you who self-deploy have also experienced it, because it is the philosophy to be 100% open.
We expect the same from the community. I see there are great ideas floating around in the forums etc, and it pains to see that effort is not made to bring them back into the core.
Also think about the stage of the project. We are maybe 60% there, but there is lots to be done. Maybe once the project reaches 90% mark, then there won’t be an expectation of contribution.
Right now there are lots of areas, lot of people can contribute. And lot of you are are doing so. So many people are already helping out on the forum.
More help could be:
- Documentation
- Reviewing Pull Requests (add your comments to pulls by others)
- Reviewing GitHub Issues (tag them, close them, merge them if required)
- Fixing issues that you have experienced yourself
- Making a priority list (roadmap) - maybe setup a regular call regarding the same.
- Improving UX
- Refactoring old code (and deprecated API)
We don’t expect people to go out of the way to get things done, but pick something that can be fix with very little effort.
- For example if you find documentation is missing for a particular feature or setting, it takes an additional 5 mins to push a fix to the docs.
- Or if you discover your customer is unable to understand the workflow, and a simple navigation or re-arrangement can fix it, then you can fix that too.
- If you are writing code related to a doctype and you find deprecated API adjacent to your code, just fix that.
In my personal experience, whenever I am working on some feature, I always find something adjacent to fix. It may increase the scope of the project by say 5% but since you are “in the context” its easy to fix it.
The hardest part as a developer is to switch context into some piece of code and then fix it. If you are already “invested” in the context, its much easier to fix something than getting into some fix cold.
Another big factor is motivation. If while testing, I discover an unrelated bug, I have more motivation to fix it because I have discovered it.
ERPNext is already a massive project, hence we need more people to do housekeeping when they get a chance. It does not have to be explicit, just make it a part of your regular workflow.
Its just small things that make us feel as a community, not unlike any other civic community