Contribute
FieldTrip is an Open Source project with contributions from many individual users and research groups. There are various ways in which you can also contribute to FieldTrip.
Share your expertise
The FieldTrip community is organized around the email discussion list. You can contribute by helping other people, answering questions from other people on the email list, or sharing your ideas.
Report bugs or request enhancements
You can provide us with detailed bug reports. The easier it is for one of us to reproduce the bug, the more likely it is that we can fix the problem. You can use the same approach to request new functionality. We cannot guarantee that we have time to implement it, but it is still good to know what people would like to do with FieldTrip.
Contribute code
You can share your MATLAB code with us and help us to integrate it into the FieldTrip toolbox. We use git and GitHub to manage the code. On the development section of this website you can find more details on how the project and code are organized. You can of course also ask.
If your contribution is considerable, for example a completely new algorithm, there are some additional requirements: your code contribution must be in FieldTrip style, the algorithm must be of broad interest (i.e. more than a single lab), must be maintainable and must be documented not only with help in the code, but also on the website as a tutorial or as example script.
When you contribute code, please consider the code guidelines to keep it consistent and compatible with the existing implementation. Also try to adhere to the existing representation of the data in the data structures.
Contribute documentation
You are invited to improve existing or add your own tutorials, example scripts or answers to frequently asked questions to this website. Rather than typing an email explaining the same thing over-and-over again, a page on the website can increase the long-term efficiency and impact of your explanation.
You can contribute to this website by going to the corresponding website repository on GitHub, editing or adding a page there and sending your suggestion as a “pull request”. All contributions are reviewed by the maintainers. If you are not sure about the quality of your contribution, just submit it as pull request and we will check, improve and/or provide feedback if needed.
You can also edit pages on this website directly in your browser: just go to the bottom of any page, click the “Edit this page on GitHub” link and click on the pencil symbol (see below). After making the change, you write a (very short) description of why you made it. Your change will be automatically sent as pull-request, reviewed by one of the maintainers, and merged.
When adding documentation, please consider the documentation guidelines to keep it consistent with other documentation and to facilitate cross-linking.