# Contributing

Interested in contributing to the Material theme? Before you do, please read
the following guidelines.

## Submission context

### Got a question or problem?

For quick questions there's no need to open an issue as you can reach us on
[gitter.im][1].

  [1]: https://gitter.im/mkdocs-material/general

### Found a bug?

If you found a bug in the source code, you can help us by submitting an issue
to our GitHub Repository. Even better, you can submit a Pull Request with a
fix. However, before doing so, read the submission guidelines.

### Missing a feature?

You can request a new feature by submitting an issue to our GitHub Repository.
If you would like to implement a new feature, please submit an issue with a
proposal for your work first, to be sure that it is of use for everyone, as
the Material theme is highly opinionated. Please consider what kind of change
it is:

* For a **Major Feature**, first open an issue and outline your proposal so
  that it can be discussed. This will also allow us to better coordinate our
  efforts, prevent duplication of work, and help you to craft the change so
  that it is successfully accepted into the project.

* **Small Features** and bugs can be crafted and directly submitted as a Pull
  Request. However, there is no guarantee that your feature will make it into
  the master, as it's always a matter of opinion whether if benefits the
  overall functionality of the theme.

## Submission guidelines

### Submitting an issue

Before you submit an issue, please search the issue tracker, maybe an issue for
your problem already exists and the discussion might inform you of workarounds
readily available.

We want to fix all the issues as soon as possible, but before fixing a bug we
need to reproduce and confirm it. In order to reproduce bugs we will
systematically ask you to provide a minimal reproduction scenario using the
custom issue template.

Unfortunately we are not able to investigate / fix bugs without a minimal
reproduction, so if we don't hear back from you we are going to close issues
that don't have enough information to be reproduced.

### Submitting a Pull Request (PR)

Search GitHub for an open or closed PR that relates to your submission. You
don't want to duplicate effort. Fork the project, make your changes in **a new
git branch** and commit your changes with a descriptive commit message. Then
push your branch to GitHub and send a PR to `mkdocs-material:master`. If we
suggest changes, make the required updates, rebase your branch and push
the changes to your GitHub repository, which will automatiaclly update your PR.

After your PR is merged, you can safely delete your branch and pull the changes
from the main (upstream) repository.