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Contributing

ImprovedTube edited this page Dec 4, 2024 · 76 revisions

Spread the word

What about telling friends, or discussing here (or on reddit, twitter, quora, etc.) And please let us know if you make/made a blog-post or video about us.

Documentation

We need concise explanations with .gifs /screenshots /videos. And content for Tooltips in the app. (And invisible Tags & alternative names of the features for search, multi-language)

Translation

You can help us to translate ImprovedTube. Please, check the wiki page.

Test

You can help us by logging any bugs you find. (As a small team, prioritization is critical, so knowing which issues are impactful for many users or not can help us.)

  • BTW, you can check an extension in incognito mode ( chrome://extensions details or chrome://extensions/?id=bnomihfieiccainjcjblhegjgglakjdd) )
  • In some cases, we might compare the DOM YouTube gives you, by copying the whole <html> root element (includes all children), in the top left of Dev-Tools:
    (FireFox:)
    • (There are 2-3 different versions of this depending if you open a new window or clicked a link on YouTube. While the bug might not happen in each of these moments.)

Donate

We are volunteers. ImprovedTube is made out of love for our users. Your happiness is the currency of our hearts. We dare to keep ImprovedTube open-source & free, despite it is still a lot of work, that won't stop while YouTube releases updates.

Development

Welcome! (Some inspiration Pinned issues, https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLMediaElement & #1881

Adding a feature:

  • Edit our english locale.py to add / change the human language in the extension.

  • All our functions depend on variables set by our toggles and called through chrome API, but we already store them as ImprovedTube.storage

    • and we store all enabled features as CSS attributes too (of the element). However this is just an option and most of all CSS should primarily depend JS or both)
  • We react to user changes of settings immediately, so that we can call the feature before the next page-reload (or possibly an introductory animation and "farewell-animation too when removing something?)

  • We have some global variables & regex

  • We observe the DOM for changes to apply features as soon as certain elements appear

  • We have our extension popup's GUI & re-purposable functions in our little library Satus.js

  • if your edit requires a difference in one browser: Add to our build.py.

Updating the name or value of a feature of option in our menu?: Import people's old storage!

Developer convenience (/Efficiency /Methods)


  • "Debate: Predicting Youtube-DOM changes?"

    The important CSS IDs (& pathes) _should_ stay the same in all current & future YouTube.
    Yet, we _could_ predict how Youtube might be renaming some still... An Extension could even search for new names if old ones disappear. More over, regEx can be cheap & even CSS allows some wildcards / 'regular expressions' *= ^= $=
year 1. yt- 1. ytd- 2. yt- 2. ytd-
May 2024 32 62 2387 (2468) 3115 (3175)
2024 32 63
2021 31 61
2020 24 58
2018 & 2019 700 0
2014 1400 0
2013 1 0

GitHub in general:

  • Pull Requests by command-line: gh pr create --base master --title "my PR" --body "fixing..."

    • Alternatively: hub pull-request acts as a wrapper for git) https://github.com/github/hub
      • (Or if you hate all Pull Requests, we might allow you to make commits after a few PRs)
  • Reading issues in ranked/structured/rewarding way: We can work on the top bugs, plans & wishes ordered by popularity

    • For example: The bugs on top will be most important and/or half-solved
      • also linked in our readme.md - "tidy" could be first in the ToDo-List, besides it is last in the ToDo list requiring permission and assumming new contributors reading it, while repeat-contributors tidy already. ) (You might also want to edit our Readme)