First-time contributor looking for guidance on where to contribute meaningfully in Plone

Plone Support
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Hello everyone,

I’m a first-time open source contributor and currently getting familiar with the Plone ecosystem. I wanted to briefly introduce myself, share what I’ve been doing so far, and ask for some guidance.

About me

I'm a first time contributor to open source and still figuring things out. I'm currently reading the Plone docs and going through the Plone training to learn how to make good open source contributions. I'm a GSOC 2026 aspirant and I've been coding for 1.5 years. I'm a MERN stack developer and have dabbled a bit in app development as well.

What I’ve tried so far

While reading the documentation, I noticed a few typos and grammatical issues, which are quite small but they felt like a good place for me to start contributing while learning the workflow.

  • I initially forked and cloned the plone/documentation repository to fix one such issue.

  • Later, I realized that the specific documentation I was editing belonged to Volto, which lives in plone/volto, not plone/documentation.

  • I then forked and cloned plone/volto, created a branch, and fixed the typo there.

However, after that, I learned that Volto is undergoing improvements for a new version release and is not accepting pull requests from first-time contributors. To avoid wasting maintainers’ time, I opened an issue instead: #7799, describing the documentation fix.

I completely understand that maintainers are busy with higher-priority work and that a small typo fix isn’t important right now.

What I’m asking for

To avoid putting effort into the wrong place again, I’d really appreciate some guidance on:

  • Which Plone repositories are currently open to first-time contributors

  • Which repos are actively maintained and suitable for small but meaningful contributions (documentation, tests, minor fixes, etc.)

I hope to contribute in ways that are genuinely helpful someday, till then I'll be thoroughly reading the docs and figuring out the codebase of plone/volto.

Thanks for maintaining such a welcoming ecosystem.

— Kathrina

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As you have mentioned that you are a MERN stack developer, so Volto would be a great place to start, as it has all the frontend code written using React. To get started with volto please read and follow Contributing to Plone https://6.docs.plone.org/contributing/index.html and First-time contributors https://6.docs.plone.org/contributing/first-time.html. For training, you can follow this https://training.plone.org/. also there is a very good playlist on youtube which you can follow along with reading training docs https://youtu.be/Jzuw3uWtzzI?si=Lzu5HztJb-y2nQH5. According to my experience, I’ll suggest spending enough time on reading these docs and understanding the codebase. Once you get comfortable with the codebase, try fixing good first issues and keep engaged with the community, eventually you will get the direction.

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I really appreciate all the training resources and docs that you’ve shared, I’ve been reading through some of them for a week now. You’re right about Volto being a good fit for my tech stack and I would love to learn more about Volto.

The only reason I didn’t proceed with a PR in Volto is because the Volto contributing guidelines mentioned that reviews for pull requests from first-time contributors are currently paused until the Plone 7 release. So I can’t open a PR in Volto, that’s why I’m asking whether there are other Plone repositories that I can contribute to as a first-time contributor. Or maybe I can fix easy issues in Volto as a first time contributor? I’m not so sure

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This is not true. You can always open PRs in Volto. However, it might not get reviewed by the Volto Team members who are focused on the release of Seven, but there are people who might review it who aren’t focused on the release of Seven.

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