Chapter 1 Contributing to this book

This is a book written in Markdown describing the FIMS development workflow for FIMS developers and contributors. It is intended as a living document and will change over time as the FIMS project matures. Some sections may be incomplete or missing entirely. Suggestions or contributions may be made via the FIMS collaborative workflow github site https://github.com/NOAA-FIMS/collaborative_workflow. This section describes how to edit and contribute to the book.

1.1 Description

Each bookdown chapter is an .Rmd file, and each .Rmd file can contain one or more chapters. A chapter must start with a first-level heading: # A good chapter, and can contain one (and only one) first-level heading.

Use second-level and higher headings within chapters like: ## A short section or ### An even shorter section.

The index.Rmd file is required, and is also your first book chapter. It will be the homepage when you render the book.

1.2 Edit and preview book changes

When you want to make a change to this book, follow the below steps: 1. Create a new feature branch either from the issue requesting the change or from the repo on Github. 2. Pull the remote branch into your local branch and make your changes to the .Rmd files locally. 3. When you are done editing, do not render the book locally, but push your changes to the remote feature branch. 4. Pushing to the remote feature branch initiates a Github action that creates a .zip file you should download and unzip. Open the file index.html in a browser to preview the rendered .html content. If the action fails, this means the bookdown could not be rendered. Use the Github action log to determine what the problem is. 5. When the book can be rendered and you are satisfied with the changes, submit a pull request to merge the feature branch into main.