This is a quick start guide for anyone who wants to contribute to the JHOVE documentation. The official home of the JHOVE documentation is now here: http://jhove.openpreservation.org/. This is a GitHub pages hosted web site meaning:
- GitHub kindly host the site;
- the documentation is part of the GitHub project so that anyone can contribute changes.
The bare minimum toolset needed to make changes to the documentation is a text editor and a knowledge of either HTML or Markdown. The site also uses Bootstrap for look and feel but you can make changes without knowing any Bootstrap.
The source code for the website is held in the specifically named gh-pages branch of the git project. You can see it on GitHub, the home page for the website is the index.html file in the root directory. The folders starting with and underscore, _data, _includes, and _layouts provide site structure and page layouts and need only interest the curious. The directories css and img contain site stylesheets and images respectively. The other directories correspond to content paths on the website, for example documentation/index.html is the site's http://jhove.openpreservation.org/documentation/ page.
If you're unfamiliar with GitHub Pages then their home page: https://pages.github.com/ is a good starting point. Under the hood it uses Jekyll to convert the GitHub gh-pages branch to the website. This conversion puts together pages and converts any Markdown files to HTML. If you're unfamiliar with Markdown, this file is written in it. It's a text-to-HTML conversion tool meaning that files can be written in a friendly plain text format, then converted to HTML. GitHub provide a comprehensive guide to writing on GitHub which covers their own GitHub flavoured markdown. The JHOVE beginners guide is written in Markdown, you can see the markdown for the page alone in the repository here and the raw source text file here.
If you're more technically inclined you can serve a version of the site locally. This will update as you make edits and makes working with the documentation very quick. GitHub have already produced a good guide to this https://help.github.com/articles/setting-up-your-github-pages-site-locally-with-jekyll/.