These articles provide step-by-step guides to accomplishing specific goals when contributing to MDN.
- How and when to remove "experimental" macros
- Pages on MDN can include KumaScript macros to notify readers that a Web technology feature described by the page is still experimental and not yet standardized. You can help improve MDN by reviewing pages that contain these "experimental" macros, and removing the macros from items that are no longer experimental.
- How to add or update browser compatibility data
- If you have information about browser compatibility of Web features — or are willing and able to do some research and/or experimentation — you can help update MDN's Browser Compatibility Data (BCD).
- How to be a beta tester
- From time to time, as the developers of MDN's Kuma platform make changes to the site, we provide early access to those new features to members who have opted in to be beta testers. As is typical with any "beta" test, features might not work properly in some situations.
- How to convert code samples to be "live"
- Live samples, which let you see what a sample's output looks like, make documentation more dynamic and instructive. This guide covers how to take existing samples and add "live" functionality to them.
- How to create an interactive learning exercise
- When learning the web, it's important to rely on active learning content. Such content is made to help with learning something pro-actively. It can be exercises, live hackable examples, tasks to perform, assessments, etc. In short, anything that can help someone to actively understand something.
- How to create an MDN account
- To edit MDN content, you need an MDN profile. You don't need a profile to read or search the MDN docs. This guide will help you create your MDN profile.
- How to create and edit pages
- This article introduces new contributors to the process of editing existing pages and creating new ones.
- How to create learning pathways
- A learning pathway is basically a set of articles to read and exercises to complete in order to learn something, usually in a specific order. However, creating good, efficient pathways requires some work; this guide will help you learn how to plan and create a learning pathway on MDN.
- How to delete my profile
- If you decide that you no longer want to have an account on MDN, you can request for your account to be deleted. However, we can't delete any revisions (page changes) you've made, and our content license requires that your revisions have an attribution. If you have made revisions, you must decide whether you want your revisions to be attributed to your username, or to be re-attributed to "Anonymous".
- How to do a technical review
- This article describes how to perform a technical review, thereby helping to ensure that MDN's content is accurate.
- How to do an editorial review
- This article describes how to do an editorial review, which helps ensure that MDN's content is accurate and well-written.
- How to document a CSS property
- As the CSS standards evolve, new properties are always being added. The MDN CSS Reference needs to be kept up to date with these developments. This document gives step-by-step instructions for creating a CSS property reference page.
- How to document an HTTP header
- The MDN HTTP header reference documents HTTP header fields are components of the header section of request and response messages in the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). They define the operating parameters of an HTTP transaction. This page explains how to create a new MDN reference page for an HTTP header.
- How to document Mozilla projects
- This document attempts to explain the process by which you should document Mozilla related subjects. In some sense, this document is just a "how to be a tech writer" with lots of Mozilla-specific information thrown in.
- How to document web errors
- The MDN JavaScript error reference is a new project aiming to help web developers with errors occurring in the Developer Console.
- How to migrate external content to MDN Web Docs
- This article covers what kinds of content potentially make sense to migrate, whether you should migrate content or not, and what workflow to use to undertake the migration.
- How to properly tag pages
- This page explains the best way to tag pages so that our readers can find information and we can keep ourselves organized.
- How to recruit a technical reviewer
- Finding someone who is not only expert enough but has the time to and is willing to help by performing a technical review of content you've created or updated can be tricky. Even once you find the right person for the job, getting them to make time in their busy schedule for a technical review—which may not be a priority for them—can sometimes require finesse. This guide will help you find the right person for the job, then convince them to help.
- How to report a problem on MDN
- Now and then, you may run into problems while using MDN. Whether it's a problem with site infrastructure or an error in documentation content, you can either try to fix it yourself or report the problem. While the former is preferred, the latter is sometimes the best you can manage, and that's okay too.
- How to resolve a dev-doc-needed bug
- Bugzilla is a web-based application that is used to track all changes to all Mozilla software projects. Some bugs (flagged with the "dev-doc-needed" keyword) require changes to the documentation on MDN as well as changes to the source code. However, sometimes the comments and descriptions in bugs are obscure and it is difficult to understand what needs to be done on MDN. This page provides a description and example of the steps we use to update MDN.
- How to resolve a mentored developer doc request
- The MDN Web Docs project has a large backlog of requests for changes, in Mozilla's Bugzilla instance. You can help improve MDN by fixing a problem and closing the request.
- How to set the summary for a page
- In this article, we'll show you how to set the SEO summary (also known as the description or just as the summary) of an article on the MDN Web Docs site.
- How to tag JavaScript pages
- Tagging consists of adding meta-information to pages so that related content can be grouped, for example in the search tool.
- How to update the CSS JSON DB
- Several characteristics of a CSS property, like its syntax or if it can be animated, are mentioned in multiple pages on MDN and are therefore stored in an ad-hoc "database". This database actually consists of several JSON files containing CSS related information, which are stored on GitHub. This article describes how to update this structure.
- How to use navigation sidebars
- MDN's sidebars are not created automatically; to include them on the page, you need to create and use a macro of some sort. In this article, we will review the process of both creating MDN sidebar macros and how to use them in an article.
- How to write an API reference
- This guide takes you through all you need to know to write an API reference on MDN.
- How to write an article to help people learn about the Web
- This article explains how to write pages for the Learning Area.
- How to write and reference an entry in the glossary
- This article explains how to add and link to entries in the MDN Web Docs glossary. It also provide guidelines about glossary entry layout and content.
- How to write Mozilla interface reference documentation
- This article demonstrates how to create properly-formatted and useful documentation for Mozilla interfaces. Each interface should be documented in its own article, with the article's title being the name of the interface.
- How to write with SEO in mind on MDN Web Docs
- This guide covers our standard practices, recommendations, and requirements for content to help ensure that search engines can easily categorize and index our material in order to ensure that users can easily reach what they need.