This repository hosts the MEI Guidelines, the official documentation of the Music Encoding Initiative. Edits and contributions are encouraged.
If you wish to contribute changes to the Guidelines, you can edit the files directly on GitHub. The text of the Guidelines is written in a dialect of Markdown.
In the guidelines you will see links to "Edit this section". Clicking on this will open up an editor in GitHub, where you will be able to click on the 'pencil' to edit the text of the section. When you are finished, you can then "Propose a file change," where you can write a brief summary of your changes and their motivations, and then "Create a Pull Request," which will alert the MEI Technical Team of your proposed change. If there are any questions or problems with your suggested change, a discussion can happen on the Pull Request, and then it will be merged into the Guidelines.
In some cases you will see special markup that will create automatic links between the documentation and the Elements list, or pull in sample snippets of XML. If you need help with this Markdown, the Technical Team will be happy to help.
For complex contributions, you may wish to get the documentation running on your local machine, and submit a larger Pull Request. This will be explained in the next section.
If you wish to contribute significant changes, you will likely want to checkout the code from this repository and work on it locally. To do so you will need to install Jekyll, which requires Ruby. This guide will assume you have a functioning Ruby environment, with the gem and bundle commands available. If you do not, follow these instructions on getting these set up.
You should fork the Guidelines into your own repository using the 'Fork' button on GitHub. This will make a copy of the Guidelines which you can edit.
Create a new branch for your changes on your local Git repository. You should make it a descriptive name, like 'mensural-guidelines-updates' or similar.
Run bundle install in your directory. This will install all of the requirements for running the site locally.
Windows user should check out this step-by-step guide to setting up Jekyll on Windows: http://jekyll-windows.juthilo.com/
You can run the Jekyll service locally with bundle exec jekyll serve --baseurl="". This will compile the site and start serving the content locally. Since compiling can take a while, you can add the option -V to get a more verbose output and information about the running compilation steps. Once it's ready, you can open your browser and visit http://localhost:4000 to see your local version of the site.
You should now be able to make your changes. Try to keep your commits as 'atomic' as possible; that is, commit only the changes necessary for a given set of functionality. Avoid large commits that change a lot of things, as this makes it harder to review your changes for unintended side effects and potential problems.
Once all of your changes have been committed and pushed to your fork, you can propose a change to the main Guidelines repository by opening a Pull Request. This will alert the editors that you have a change you wish to contribute. The editors will review your changes and may ask for modifications or clarification in the Pull Request. Once your changes have been reviewed and accepted, they will be merged in and will then be available on the Guidelines website.
When your pull request has been accepted, it is then safe to delete the branch that you created in Step 2. This will ensure you do not have older branches around that get progressively outdated.