How Do I Help Contribute to Design With FontForge? - Quick Pictorial Help Guide

[JoesCat]

Not everyone is a Developer, however some of you have skills that are still considered important to helping improve projects such as "Design with FontForge".

For example, skills like language translations, or spelling corrections, or adding more info to "Design With FontForge". Many small contributions done by various contributors periodically over time are better than depending on one large contribution made by one person, which that may not happen at all.

In General, the more eyes that look, help fix, correct, improve a project, the better the project becomes.

This issue is here to help point-out a subtle, but easily missed part of contributions - about 'branches'. What are 'branches'? This will be pointed-out later.

1. Let's start with, how to setup your own cloned 'FORK' of "Design with FontForge"
   
   From the main 'Tree-trunk' located here: https://github.com/fontforge/designwithfontforge.com/ you will see an invitation to create your own Fork.

2. Keep it simple:
   This creates your own copy of "Design with FontForge".

3. At this point, you have your own cloned copy of "Design with FontForge".
   
   ...you will notice a "Contribute" button and a "Sync fork" button, but for contributors who are not developers, this can easily be missed.... "gh-pages" is the main 'tree-trunk', and if you want to contribute, you really should create a 'branch'.
   This does not make sense at first, but you may notice later, the differences when it comes to "Sync fork". When you create a contribution as a 'branch', you can continue to maintain an identical 'cloned' copy of the "Design with FontForge" as your contibutions are merged with the main "Design with FontForge" while other people are also creating their own contributions.
   If you create a contribution on the main 'tree-trunk' (gh-pages), your version of "Design with FontForge" can be added and merged into the 'main tree-trunk', but you will find with time that your copy of "Design with FontForge" begins to look different from other contributor's versions, and eventually with the main "Design with FontForge".

Okay, so what do I do?

4. Let's create a 'branch'. The 'branch' is where you contribute your changes and improvements. In this example, the 'branch' is called "Add My Translation"
   
   If you want to see this in a graphical point of view, click on the other "fork" seen on the side panel.

5. This is a view of the various 'branches' and 'forks' made by yourself and other contributors. In this example you can see "Add My Translation".
   
   If you want to see a "busy" network with multiple contributors, sometimes at the same time, you could look at the main FontForge network which has over 600 forks, in various states, like some open, some merged, etc...

Hopefully this issue helps potential contributors with the concept of 'please create a branch' before creating a contribution you want to eventually merge. You can create your own 'branches', or delete them, or improve them, while at the same time allowing you to continue to maintain your own 'fork' that can be kept in 'sync' with the main 'tree-trunk' "Design with FontForge"