How to make your first contribution to Umbraco

How to make your first contribution to Umbraco through open-source

Recently our agency was recognised as an Umbraco Contributing Platinum Partner, which is something we’re incredibly proud of. And it's not just because of the badge, it's about what it represents. It reflects time spent helping improve the platform, supporting the community, and giving something back to an ecosystem that we rely on every day.

One thing we hear quite often though is this:

"I’d like to contribute to Umbraco, but I have no idea where to start."

Open source can feel intimidating if you’ve never done it before. Big repositories, lots of issues, unfamiliar processes… it can feel like you need to be a core contributor before you even begin. The reality is much simpler. Most open-source journeys start with very small contributions. Sometimes they don’t even involve writing code.

If you work with Umbraco regularly, you’re probably already closer to contributing than you think.

Here’s how to get started.

Why contributing matters

Umbraco has always championed a community driven platform. The CMS itself, the documentation, packages, tooling, and even the events are all shaped by people across the community. Developers, agencies, MVPs and enthusiasts all play a part.

As an agency that builds solutions on Umbraco every day, contributing back just makes sense for us. It helps improve the platform we use, it supports the wider community and it allows us to share things we’ve learned along the way.

But importantly, contributing isn’t something reserved for experienced contributors or long-time community members. Everyone starts somewhere.

Start with something familiar

The easiest place to begin is with something you already use. That could be:

Umbraco CMS itself

The Umbraco documentation

A package you use on projects

A community tool or starter kit

When you work with something regularly, you naturally start spotting things that could be improved.

Maybe…

You notice a typo in the docs.

An example could be clearer.

You’ve hit a small bug and worked around it before.

Those kinds of observations are exactly where contributions often begin.

Understand the basics

Most Umbraco projects live on GitHub and follow the usual open-source workflow.

There are a few common terms you’ll see:

Issue

A ticket used to track bugs, feature ideas or improvements.

Pull Request (PR)

A request to merge your change into the project.

Maintainers

The people responsible for reviewing contributions and managing the project. If you're new to this process, a great way to learn is simply by browsing existing pull requests. Reading through them helps you understand how contributors describe changes and how maintainers provide feedback. It quickly starts to feel much less mysterious.

Look for beginner friendly issues

Many repositories mark certain issues as good starting points.

You’ll often see labels such as:

Good first issue

Help wanted

Documentation

These are ideal places to begin because they are usually smaller and clearly defined. Your first contribution might be something simple like improving a documentation page or correcting a typo. That might sound small, but it still helps the project and gets you familiar with the process.

Read the contribution guidelines

Most projects include a README.md or specifically CONTRIBUTING.md file which can explain how to contribute.

This usually covers things like:

How to set up the project locally

Coding standards

How pull requests should be structured

How issues should be reported

It’s worth spending a few minutes reading through this before making changes. It saves time later and helps keep contributions consistent with the rest of the project.

Talk to the community

One of the best things about Umbraco is the community around it.

If you’re unsure about contributing, there are plenty of places where you can ask questions or get advice.

That might be:

Umbraco Discord

GitHub discussions

Local meetups

Larger events like Codegarden, or Umbraco Spark

Our friendly community are generally very welcoming to newcomers. Many maintainers are happy to point people towards good first issues or explain how something works. You don’t have to figure everything out on your own.

Making your first pull request

When you’re ready to contribute, the process is straightforward.

Typically, you would:

Fork the repository

Clone it locally

Create a new branch

Make your change

Push the branch

Open a pull request

When opening the PR, include a short explanation of what you changed and why it improves the project. If the change relates to an issue, you can reference that too. Maintainers might come back with suggestions or questions. That’s completely normal and part of the collaboration process.