Contributing to These Docs

These docs are written and maintained by Fab Lab staff and student workers — people like you. If you spot a mistake, an outdated step, or a machine quirk the page doesn’t mention, you can fix it yourself from your browser. No Git experience or software installs needed — this page walks you through every click.

Every change you propose becomes a pull request (a “PR”): your edit, shown side-by-side with the original, waiting for a maintainer to approve and publish it. You can’t break the site — nothing goes live until a maintainer merges your PR, and automatic checks catch things like broken links first. So be bold.

NOTE

You’ll need a free GitHub account, and for anything beyond a simple text edit you’ll want to be added to the Fab Lab’s GitHub organization — ask a maintainer on Discord and they’ll add you in a minute.

Fixing or improving a page

1. On the page you want to change, scroll to the bottom and click Edit page. GitHub opens the page’s text in an editor. (If GitHub offers to “fork this repository”, accept — that’s just GitHub making you a personal copy to edit.)
2. Make your change. The pages are plain text with light Markdown formatting — ## Heading, **bold**, 1. numbered steps. Copy the style of the text around your edit, and use the Preview tab to check how it looks.
3. Click the green Commit changes… button. In the box that pops up, replace the default message with a short description of what you changed (e.g. “Fix bed size on Bambu page”), keep “Create a new branch and start a pull request” selected, and click Propose changes.
4. On the next screen, click Create pull request. Done — that’s the whole thing.

A maintainer will get notified, and an automatic reviewer (Claude, an AI) will usually leave a comment on your PR within a few minutes pointing out anything worth double-checking — broken links, formatting slips, a missing step. Its comments are suggestions to help you, not a gate. If you know something it doesn’t, say so.

To respond to feedback or fix something in your open PR, open the Files changed tab of the PR, click the ⋯ menu on the file, choose Edit file, and commit again — your PR updates automatically. You never need to start over.

Adding photos or images

Images live in the same folder as the page that uses them, so this is a two-step trip: upload the image, then reference it from the page — both in the same pull request.

1. In the repo, browse to the machine’s folder under src/content/docs/docs/ (e.g. Laser Cutter).

2. Click Add file → Upload files, and drag your image in. Give the file a descriptive name before uploading (glowforge-lid-latch.jpg, not IMG_4032.jpg). Keep photos reasonably sized — a phone photo is fine, but nothing over a few MB.

3. Under the upload box, select “Create a new branch for this commit and start a pull request”, then Propose changes → but don’t click “Create pull request” as your final step yet if you also need to edit the page — first:

4. While on your new branch (GitHub shows its name in the branch picker, top-left of the file listing), open the page that should show the image, click the pencil (Edit this file), and add an image line where it belongs:

   ![The lid latch on the front-right corner](glowforge-lid-latch.jpg)

   The text in [...] describes the image for screen readers and broken-image fallbacks — always write it. Commit directly to the same branch.

5. Now open the pull request for your branch (GitHub will be offering a yellow “Compare & pull request” banner). One PR, image + page together.

If that branch dance goes sideways, don’t worry — just upload the image in one PR and ask in the PR comment for help wiring it into the page. Someone will finish it with you.

Adding a whole new page

1. In the right folder, click Add file → Create new file. Name it after the page title, ending in .md — e.g. Changing the Laser Tube.md. Folders become sidebar sections automatically, so putting the file in Laser Cutter/ is all the navigation setup there is.

2. Start the file with exactly this (the site renders the title as the page heading — don’t repeat it as a # line in the body):

   ---
   title: Changing the Laser Tube
   ---
   
   Your content starts here...

3. Commit and open the PR the same way as above.

Machine manuals follow a house structure (hazard callouts up top, Before you start, Operating, Finishing up) — see DOCS_FORMAT.md or just copy the shape of a finished page like the Laser Cutter manual. Don’t let the format stop you from contributing, though — content first; a maintainer can reshape.

Editing several files at once (the power tool)

On any page of the repo on GitHub, press the . (period) key. A full editor (VS Code in your browser) opens where you can edit and create multiple files, then commit them all as one pull request from the source-control icon in the left sidebar. Nothing to install, and it handles images too.

Ground rules

• Never write specs, settings, or policies you’re not sure of. If you don’t know, say so in the page as [placeholder] or ask the machine lead — a confident wrong number on a machine page is dangerous.
• No private info. This repo and site are public: no credentials, no personal phone numbers or emails, no staff-only procedures.
• No huge files. Anything over 25 MB fails the checks automatically. Big files (videos, 3D scans) need a maintainer’s help to host elsewhere.
• Renaming or deleting a page? That breaks its web address, which needs a redirect entry — mention it in your PR and a maintainer will handle the redirect, or see public/_redirects if you’re comfortable.

Stuck at any step? Ask on Discord — helping you land your first PR is a normal request, not an imposition.