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Getting Started
This document is for people who haven't worked with GitHub before or would like a refresher. As with anything, the first time can be intimidating.
GitHub is a platform which is most often used by developers to store code with which they are working. You may have heard terms like "source control" or "code management" applied to code. GitHub allows us to keep ALL old versions of content while easily sharing access and permissions. While it may seem like an odd place to manage a set of articles and documents, it's what Microsoft has chosen to use because it offers many automation tools and a consistent, simple interface.
A repository - or repo - is a set of content which belongs together based on its purpose. We usually store code for a particular project in its own repo. Likewise, this repo - microsoft-365-community - is separate from the other repos in the MicrosoftDocs' organization space because the goals for the content store herein are different than its sibling repos.
The "content" in a GitHub repo can be any file type - including code, of course – but in the microsoft-365-community repo, we're focused on text documents. These documents are similar to blog posts or other things you might write and put on the Web somewhere. In this case, we use markdown for file formatting. Markdown is sort of analogous to HTML in a sense in that its a way to encode content for formatting purposes. Markdown is pretty simple, but of course there is a learning curve. Nearly everyone uses a Docs Markdown reference for a while until they are more familiar with the tool set.
In GitHub, we use Issues to have interactions about the content. Look at the open issues (that's the default view) to see what we have as outstanding content needs, as well as interactions about other aspects of the repo's content. You can also add an issue if you'd like to write something or if you see a problem with the existing content.
There are multiple issue templates:
- Article Issue - See something wrong in an existing article? Suggest a fix here.
- Article Suggestion - Wish there was an article covering a topic near and dear to you? Suggest it here.
- Question - Have a general question? Ask it here.
Create a pull request to propose changes in a repository. These changes are proposed in a fork, which ensures that the master branch only contains finished and approved work.
Anyone with read permissions to a repository can create a pull request. This will automatically create a fork (duplicate copy of the repo) where you can make your edits to submit for approval by an administrator of the master branch. For more information download our step-by-step guide for navigating this repository and submitting pull requests, Creating a pull request from a fork and About forks.