You can use HipChat to instant message individuals and groups. "Chats" are organized into rooms, by team and other interest, and by individuals.
Follow the instructions at HipChat Downloads to get set up on your desktop and mobile devices. If you do not have the app installed, you can also access HipChat via a browser.
To search for edX HipChat rooms, follow these steps.
We recommend the following rooms, as well as any rooms for engineering and product teams you're on.
You need to create an account on these three sites. You can use the same email address for all three, but they are separate sites.
For all three sites, you have to create an account, then request course creation rights. When you create a Studio account for each site, you automatically receive an LMS account for each site with the same credentials. (The reverse is not true, so always create accounts on the Studio site.)
GitHub is a website for viewing and managing Git repositories – which are just collections of files. You can access GitHub either from your web browser, or by using GitHub's desktop application, which is appropriately named "GitHub Desktop". You'll need the desktop application in order to work with branches locally.
Note: You can also use GitHub from the command line.
Whether you use the GitHub Desktop application or the command line to work with git, you need a git username and access to the edx-documentation repo.
We write documentation as reStructured Text (.rst) files using a common text editor, Sublime. We then use Make to build local HTML versions of our .rst files.
Make requires XCode. The following process installs both XCode and Make.
Note: Install GitHub first and ensure that you have access to the edx/edx-documentation repository.
xcode-select --install
Sphinx converts .rst files into PDF and HTML online. This tool requires that you have already installed XCode.
In a terminal window, run the following commands from the edx-documentation directory:
The doc team uses SnagIt to edit images. You can also use SnagIt to capture images, or you can use the native image capturing capability on a Mac (CMD+SHIFT+4). If you use SnagIt to capture the image, the image opens in SnagIt automatically.
Note: For complex changes, the team might use Photoshop. We're currently trying to use SnagIt exclusively, however. To use Photoshop, contact IT and ask for a license.
You can use any text editor to edit ReStructured Text (.rst
) files, but the documentation team generally uses Sublime Text. Be sure to install version 3, not version 2.
It's convenient to use Sublime Text for writing Git commit messages and handling interactive rebases. To do this, we need to teach Git how to open and use Sublime Text. First, we'll add the subl command to the PATH, so that Git can find it. To do that, run this command:
sudo ln -s /Applications/Sublime\ Text.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl /usr/local/bin/subl
You may need to type in the password to your computer to make the command work. Once you've done so, you can verify that it worked by running
which subl
And you should see /usr/local/bin/subl as the output. Next, you need to tell Git to use the subl command as the editor. To do that, run this command:
git config --global core.editor "subl -n -w"
Now, you should be able to run any Git command that opens an editor, like "git commit" or "git rebase -i", and the editor should open in Sublime Text!
Packages give Sublime Text new features that it didn't have before. For example, there are packages to integrate Sublime Text with GitHub, or to preview what your RST will look like on ReadTheDocs. If you've never added a package to Sublime Text before, you must first install Package Control, the Sublime Text package manager. To do that, follow the steps on the installation page.
Once you've installed Package Control, you should then install the following packages:
To install a package, follow these steps:
Sublime Text can work better for you if you adjust some settings in the application. To do that, follow these steps:
Preferences.sublime-settings
file opens in the editor.Copy and paste the following into the file:
{ "word_wrap": true, "wrap_width": 80, "trim_trailing_white_space_on_save": true, "ensure_newline_at_eof_on_save": true, "translate_tabs_to_spaces": true } |
If the file already contains preferences, don't include the additional pair of braces when you copy the code block above. You'll also need to add a comma to whichever preference ends up in the middle of the file, for example: "translate_tabs_to_spaces": true,
There are many other settings that you can adjust, if you want. To see the full list, choose Sublime Text > Preferences > Settings – Default. Note that you should not make any changes to this "default" file! Use it only as a reference, and make your changes in the "user" file.