Contribute

This website was designed to be built and maintained by the Marxist-Leninist community, not by any organization or individual. It is modeled after the open source community in this way. We hope to make the website easy to contribute to, by individuals of all backgrounds, ethnicities, nationalities, etc, but this will be an ongoing process.

The website itself is housed on GitHub.com, a popular software repository owned by Microsoft. However, it may be moved to an alternative platform in the future, if we ever encounter issues being hosted there. GitHub was picked for its ease of use and name recognition.

The website content itself is mostly in the form of Markdown files. We highly recommend briefly familiarizing yourself with Markdown if you wish to start contributing, although the syntax is fairly intuitive once you get started. The rest of the website (such as the layout and design) is templated HTML and SASS. We use the Hugo static site generator to compile everything into a light-weight static website.

The reason for using Hugo over a content management system, such as WordPress, is to allow us to easily incorporate standard open-source workflow processes such as content-review and approvals. This is not to gatekeep editing, but to ensure content on this website is well-vetted by the ML community, and to ensure this website remains a Marxist-Leninist platform. There are many other platforms available for non-MLs.

Reporting A Problem Or Suggestion

  1. Navigate to GitHub.com and report a new issue (you may need to create an account if you don’t have one)
  2. Please provide at minimum, the page link where you noticed the problem, and details about the issue, or info about your suggestion
  3. Click “Submit New Issue”, and one of the project maintainers will review it

We encourage those who don’t feel comfortable contributing directly, to open a ticket so a maintainer can help out. Suggestions could be as simple as a link to a website, page, PDF, or other document that you feel would be helpful on the site, a link to a helpful YouTube video, or an essay you wrote yourself!

How to contribute

  1. Visit GitHub.com and sign-in or create an account
  2. Navigate to our GitHub project
  3. Find the page or template you want to edit (pages are in the content/ directory, templates are in the layouts/ directory)
  4. Once you have the individual Markdown or HTML file open, click the Edit icon in GitHub. This will create a project fork and allow you to make changes in the web based UI.
  5. Once you are done, create a descriptive title and description, and click “Propose Changes”.
  6. This will open a “Pull Request” for a project maintainer to review. Once reviewed and accepted, it’ll be deployed to the website. The maintainer may have feedback that will require you to update the pull request.

For any more complex updates then simple text changes, we recommend getting setup for local development, using Hugo and Git. More instructions for doing this will follow.