These articles provide step-by-step guides to accomplishing specific goals when contributing to MDN.
- How to be a beta tester
- From time to time, as the developers of MDN's Kuma platform make changes to the site, we provide early access to those new features to members who have opted in to be beta testers. As is typical with any "beta" test, features might not work properly in some situations.
- How to convert code samples to be "live"
- Live samples, which let you see what a sample's output looks like, make documentation more dynamic and instructive. This guide covers how to take existing samples and add "live" functionality to them.
- How to create an interactive learning exercise
- When learning the web, it's important to rely on active learning content. Such content is made to help with learning something pro-actively. It can be exercises, live hackable examples, tasks to perform, assessments, etc. In short, anything that can help someone to actively understand something.
- How to create an MDN account
- To edit content on MDN, you need an MDN profile. You don't need a profile if you only want to read and search the MDN docs. This guide will help you set up your MDN profile.
- How to create and edit pages
- The two most common tasks on MDN, which almost any MDN contributor will eventually perform, are to edit an existing page or to create a new one. This article covers the very basics of how to do each of these.
- How to create learning pathways
- A learning pathway is basically a set of articles to read and exercises to complete in order to learn something, usually in a specific order. However, creating good, efficient pathways requires some work; this guide will help you learn how to plan and create a learning pathway on MDN.
- How to delete my profile
- If you decide that you no longer want to have an account on MDN, you can request for your account to be deleted. However, we can't delete any revisions (page changes) you've made, and our content license requires that your revisions have an attribution. If you have made revisions, you must decide whether you want your revisions to be attributed to your username, or to be re-attributed to "Anonymous".
- How to do a technical review
- This article describes how to perform a technical review, thereby helping to ensure that MDN's content is accurate.
- How to do an editorial review
- This article describes how to do an editorial review, which helps ensure that MDN's content is accurate and well-written.
- How to document a CSS property
- As the CSS standards evolve, new properties are always being added. The MDN CSS Reference needs to be kept up to date with these developments. This document gives step-by-step instructions for creating a CSS property reference page.
- How to document an HTTP header
- The MDN HTTP header reference documents HTTP header fields, which are components of the header section of request and response messages in the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). They define the operating parameters of an HTTP transaction. This page explains how to create a new MDN reference page for an HTTP header.
- How to document Mozilla projects
- This document attempts to explain the process by which you should document Mozilla related subjects. In some sense, this document is just a "how to be a tech writer" with lots of Mozilla-specific information thrown in.
- How to document web errors
- The MDN JavaScript error reference is a new project aiming to help web developers with errors occurring in the Developer Console.
- How to link a GitHub account to your MDN profile
- All users who wish to contribute to MDN must add a GitHub login to their MDN account in order to edit. This article describes how to add GitHub authentication to your MDN profile.
- How to properly tag pages
- This page explains the best way to tag pages so that our readers can find information and we can keep ourselves organized.
- How to recruit a technical reviewer
- Finding someone who is not only expert enough but has the time to and is willing to help by performing a technical review of content you've created or updated can be tricky. Even once you find the right person for the job, getting them to make time in their busy schedule for a technical review—which may not be a priority for them—can sometimes require finesse. This guide will help you find the right person for the job, then convince them to help.
- How to report a problem on MDN
- Now and then, you may run into problems while using MDN. Whether it's a problem with site infrastructure or an error in documentation content, you can either try to fix it yourself or report the problem. While the former is preferred, the latter is sometimes the best you can manage, and that's okay too.
- How to resolve a dev-doc-needed bug
- Bugzilla is a web-based application that is used to track all changes to all Mozilla software projects. Some bugs (flagged with the "dev-doc-needed" keyword) require changes to the documentation on MDN as well as changes to the source code. However, sometimes the comments and descriptions in bugs are obscure and it is difficult to understand what needs to be done on MDN. This page provides a description and example of the steps we use to update MDN.
- How to resolve a mentored developer doc request
- Sometimes, when a reader finds a problem with content on MDN, they submit a Developer Documentation Request in Mozilla's Bugzilla. You can help improve MDN by fixing the problem and closing the request.
- How to set the summary for a page
- You can define the summary of a page on MDN, to be used in various ways, including in search engine results, in other MDN pages such as topical landing pages, and in tooltips.
- How to tag JavaScript pages
- Tagging consists of adding meta-information to pages so that related content can be grouped, for example in the search tool.
- How to update the CSS JSON DB
- Several characteristics of a CSS property, like its syntax or if it can be animated, are mentioned in multiple pages on MDN and are therefore stored in an ad-hoc "database". This database actually consists of several JSON files containing CSS related information, which are stored on GitHub. This article describes how to update this structure.
- How to write an API reference
- This guide takes you through all you need to know to write an API reference on MDN.
- How to write an article to help people learn about the Web
- This article explains how to write pages for the Learning Area.
- How to write and reference an entry in the glossary
- The MDN glossary is the place where we define all the terminology, jargon, and abbreviations used in documentation and coding. Contributing to the glossary is a simple way to make the Web easier for everyone to understand. You don't need a high level of technical skill to write glossary entries because they should stay simple and straightforward.
- How to write Mozilla interface reference documentation
- This article demonstrates how to create properly-formatted and useful documentation for Mozilla interfaces. Each interface should be documented in its own article, with the article's title being the name of the interface.