Before you open a new issue or ask a question in chat, you must read these guidelines. If it is evident from your issue that you failed to research your question properly, your issue may be closed without being answered.

There are a few common stumbling blocks that new users face when setting up UserFrosting for the first time. If you are new to the current version of UserFrosting, please first look at the basic requirements and installation instructions.

If you don't find what you're looking for in the troubleshooting page, then please check the existing issues, both opened and closed. Your question may have already been asked and answered before!

You can also search for help on Stack Overflow. In addition to the tags for the components that UF builds upon, such as Slim, Twig, Eloquent, jQuery Validate, Select2, there is also a UserFrosting tag as well.

There are also tags for the utilities upon which UserFrosting depends, such as Composer and Git.

In general, the Github issue tracker should only be used for bug reports. If you're just having trouble getting something to work, you should first ask your question in chat or Github Discussions.

On Github, Chat, and Discussions, please keep in mind the following:

1. Remember that courtesy and proper grammar go a long way. Please take the time to craft a precise, polite issue. We will do our best to help, but remember that this is an open-source project - none of us are getting paid a salary to develop this project, or act as your personal support hotline 😉

2. Report any errors in detail. Vague issues like "it doesn't work when I do this" are not helpful. Show that you have put some effort into identifying the cause of the error.

3. You should also mention the version of UserFrosting that you are using.

4. Post a detailed error message. There are three main places where you may find error messages:

• Non-fatal PHP errors will be logged in your UserFrosting error log. Look for your app/logs/userfrosting.log file.

• Frontend (Javascript-related) errors: in your browser's Javascript console. See this guide to using your browser console.

You should also try testing your code in a local development environment, to separate code-related issues from server issues. In general, we recommend that you install a local development server on your computer, rather than testing your code directly on the production server. This means you can test your code directly on your own computer, making development faster and without the risk of exposing sensitive information to the public.

We welcome your technical expertise! But first, please join us in chat to discuss your proposed changes/fixes/enhancements before you get started. At least one member of our development team will usually be around.

Please also be sure to read our style guidelines.

Branch representing code for a specific version. Always numbered as major.minor. The next unreleased version should sit in a branch with the corresponding version name, without "develop" or "beta" moniker.

New features that introduce some breaking changes or incomplete code should be committed in a separate feature-{major}.{minor}-{name} or develop-{major}.{minor} branch. When ready, the branch should be merged or squashed-merged (guide) into the corresponding version branch.

After every minor or major release, a new version-bumped branch should be created. For example, when releasing 5.2, a new 5.3 branch should be created for the next minor version. CHANGELOG.md should also be updated and the associated tag should be created on Github.

During alpha/beta/RC, a release candidate always sits on the version branch. Release should be numbered with the following syntax : {major}.{minor}-{alpha|beta|rc}{patch}.

Issues are used as a todo list. Each issue represent something that needs to be fixed, added or improved. Be sure to assign issues to yourself when working on something so everyone knows this issue is taken care of.

Issues are tagged to represent the feature or category it refers to. We also have some special tags to help organize issues. These includes:

• good first issue: If this is your first time contributing to UserFrosting, look for the good first issue tag. It's associated with easier issues anyone can tackle.

• up-for-grabs: Theses issues have not yet been assigned to anybody. Look for theses when you want to start working on a new issue.

• needs discussion : This issue needs to be discussed with the dev team before being implemented as more information is required, questions remain or a higher level decision needs to be made.

• needs more info: More information is required from the author of the issue.

In order to keep a clear roadmap, milestones are used to track what is happening and what needs to be done. Milestones are used to classify problems by:

• Things that need to be done ASAP
• Things we are doing right now
• Things we will probably do soon
• Things we probably will not do soon

Things that need to be done ASAP: this is the highest priority and this milestone should always be empty. Issues related to important bug fixes should be set on this milestone immediately. The milestone always refers to the next version of revision, also known as the next bugfix version.

Things we are doing right now: this is the "main" milestone we are currently working on. Usually represents the next minor version, but may also represent the next major version when the focus is on the next major release.

Things we’ll probably do soon: It's a "Next Tasks" milestone. These tasks will be addressed in the near future, but not close enough for the next version. Usually represents the second minor revision and the next major release.

Things we probably won’t do soon: We refer to these issues and sometimes look through them, but they are easy to ignore and sometimes intentionally ignored. Represent issues without milestones that do not have a defined timeframe.

To maintain a clear history of progress on each milestone, milestones must be closed when completed and the corresponding version released. A new milestone must then be created for the next release. In addition, the milestone version must be updated when new versions are released.

The Learn Documentation should always be updated along side code changes.

Changes to the learn repository should follow the same logic as the main repository, ie. any changes applied to the 5.0 version/branch should be documented in the learn 5.0 branch.

Additionally, the learn repository can have feature-* or develop-* branch for specific features and fixes.

PHP-CS-Fixer can be used to automatically fix PHP code styling. UserFrosting provides a project specific configuration file (.php_cs) with a set of rules reflecting our style guidelines. This tool should be used before submitting any code change to assure the style guidelines are met. Every sprinkles will also be parsed by the fixer.

PHP-CS-Fixer is automatically loaded by Composer and can be used from the UserFrosting root directory :

vendor/bin/php-cs-fixer fix