• Contributing
  • A labour of love
  • How can you help?
  • Using Git / GitHub Desktop to contribute…
  • Cloning a repository to your computer

Contributing

Giving back

A labour of love

fmWorkMate started in 2008 and has been a labour of love ever since.

Contributions are always welcome, and there are many ways you can help.

How can you help?

You can help MrWatson help us all to have better tools!

• ▶️ Use the tools
• ⭐️ Show you use the tools
  • get a GitHub account
  • follow me, mrwatson-de, on GitHub
  • star the repositories
• 📣 Shout about it!
  • Share / promote the tools
  • Share your experiences and enthusiasm
    • with your friends, colleagues, boss, other FileMaker developers, with Claris even!
  • Share IRL / on social media / on twitter / on TV (:D)
• 🗣 Join the discussion
  • fmWorkMate discussions
• 🚦Give feedback
  • On the repository’s issues tab you can post bugs, ideas, wishes and questions
  • [Drop me a line]
• 📖 Help document
  • If you have used a tool successfully, please feel free to submit documentation or publish a screen video
  • If you are good at writing documentation, please do!
• 📲 Contribute code
  • See below
• 💰 Donate funds
  • MrWatson’s tools are free
  • The tools are however not without development and running costs
  • So, every donation is extremly welcome, and fantastic for morale! :D
  • Donate here
• ⏱ Donate time
  • Want to help in some other way?
  • [Drop me a line]

Using Git / GitHub Desktop to contribute…

Need to clear up the best way of doing this, since FileMaker files and GitHub don’t work great together.

Basically:

• Create yourself a GitHub account, if you don’t yet have one
• Star &/ Watch your favourite repositories
• Follow @mrwatson-de
• Then…

If you want to experiment with the code, or test out using GitHub

• Fork the repo to your own GitHub account (for yourself)
• Clone your repo to your computer
• Play around

If you have FileMaker code to contribute…

• Let me know what you have added / changed
• We’ll review the changes and work out the best way to integrate them into the master database.

If you have documentation to contribute, you can use Git / Github to clone a repository to your local machine

Cloning a repository to your computer

Do this if you want to contribute changes back to the project.

• Clone the repository to your computer
  • I use
    • the GitHub Desktop app in order to get a pleasant GUI and make it easier
    • a folder in my documents folder, where I put all my GitHub projects ~/Documents/Git/<repositoryname>
  • If you are using the git command line, good luck!

Note: Since FileMaker files change every time you open them:

• I tend to copy the FileMaker file(s) to another directory before opening them
• I only copy them back to the repo folder if I have really changed them and want to synchronise the changes back to GitHub
• Like that you avoid commiting the FileMaker file back to the repo when no code has actually changed

• Make changes
• Copy the FileMaker files back to the repo folder
• Make a Pull Request