h2. Contribute to the Rails Guides

Rails guides aim to improve Rails documentation and make the barrier to entry as low as possible. We periodically publish a list of guides we want at "Rails Guides Lighthouse":http://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/16213-rails-guides/tickets?q=state%3Aavailable. You can choose the topic you like, submit the guide and win prizes.

endprologue.

h3. How to contribute?

* Update the respective Lighthouse ticket stating that you will be working on the guide.
* Once your proposal is accepted, the ticket will be put in "taken" state.
* PM lifo at "GitHub":http://github.om asking for "docrails":http://github.com/lifo/docrails commit access.
* Commit your guide under railties/guides/source directory. For example, Active Record Basics guide resides at railties/guides/source/active_record_basics.textile
* Put all the images under railties/guides/images directory, if any.
* Once the guide is complete, you should update the Lighthouse ticket with the same information and ask for it to be reviewed.

h3. Guides format

* Guides should be in Textile format.
* Sample guides format : "Active Record Associations":http://github.com/lifo/docrails/blob/3e56a3832415476fdd1cb963980d0ae390ac1ed3/railties/guides/source/association_basics.textile
* Sample guides output : "Active Record Associations":http://guides.rails.info/association_basics.html

h3. Prizes

For each completed guide, the contributor will receive all of the following prizes:

* $200 from Caboose Rails Documentation Project
* 1 year of GitHub Micro account worth a lot of money.
* 1 year of RPM Basic (Production performance management) for up to 10 hosts worth 12 months x $40 per host x $10 hosts = $4800. And also, savings of $45 per host per month over list price to upgrade to advanced product

h3. Rules

* Guides are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License
* We don't want multiple people writing the same guide, hence we allow only one person to be actively writing a guide. However, if you're very interested, please update the Lighthouse ticket anyways. In case the first person backs off, we will contact you
* If there is no/very less activity from the potential guide writer after claiming the guide, we could possibly allocate that guide to another writer
* If the same guide writer wants to write multiple guides, that's ideally the situation we'd love to be in! However, that guide writer will only receive the cash prize for all the subsequent guides
* Our review team will have the final say on whether the guide is complete and of good enough quality

h3. Reviewers

These are the main folks who'll be reviewing your guides, so always listen to them:

* Hongli Lai
* Mike Gunderloy
* Pratik Naik
* Xavier Noria

h3. Editing

To ensure consistent quality and structure, Mike Gunderloy will make a copy editing pass over each guide. To make this easier, all authors should read and follow the Rails Guides Conventions and the Rails API Documentation Conventions.

h3. IRC Channel

==#docrails @ irc.freenode.net==

h3. Contact

If you have any questions or need any clarification, feel free to contact:

* IRC : lifo, nzkoz, mikeg1a in #rubyonrails or #rails-contrib
* Email : pratiknaik aT gmail

