There are many ways to contribute to Pelican. You can enhance the documentation, add missing features, and fix bugs (or just report them).
Don’t hesitate to fork and make a pull request on GitHub.
You’re free to set up your development environment any way you like. Here is a way using virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper. If you don’t have them, you can install these packages via:
$ pip install virtualenvwrapper
Virtual environments allow you to work on Python projects which are isolated from one another so you can use different packages (and package versions) with different projects.
To create a virtual environment, use the following syntax:
$ mkvirtualenv pelican
To manually install the dependencies:
$ pip install -r dev_requirements.txt
$ python setup.py develop
Each time you add a feature, there are two things to do regarding tests: checking that the existing tests pass, and adding tests for your new feature or for the bug you’re fixing.
The tests live in “pelican/tests” and you can run them using the “discover” feature of unittest2:
$ unit2 discover
Try to respect what is described in the PEP8 (http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/) when providing patches. This can be eased by the pep8 tool (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/pep8) or by Flake8, which will give you some other cool hints about what’s good or wrong (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/flake8/)