Port legacy Contributing docs to react.dev

[forbiddenvoid]

trafficstars

Why this PR?

The documentation for contributing to React is pretty out of date and still lives on the legacy React docs site - which makes it harder for the community to work to keep that documentation current. New contributors to React are faced with having to try to parse the delta between the last update of the contribution docs (which appear not to have been changed since React 16) and the current state of the codebase.

What does this PR do?

• fixes #6450
• fixes #6124

This PR creates a new section on the Community page called "How to Contribute" which includes the 4 pages from the "Contribution" section from the legacy docs site. It also adds a new link to the footer: "Contribute to React." There are some minor style differences from the original documents (I used a blockquote at the top of each page to introduce the page). I've also updated references to Facebook to say Meta instead (if that's any indication of how long it's been since these docs have been touched). There are a couple of other minor grammatical fixes from the legacy docs as well.

What does this PR not do?

The docs are still out of date. Much of what's contained in the codebase overview and implementation notes need to be updated or completely rewritten. Updating the docs is not a goal of this PR. Instead, I intend this PR to simply make sure that the existing documentation is ported over to react.dev so we have a place to build from to ensure that everyone has what they need to feel comfortable and confident contributing to React.

[github-actions[bot]]

Size changes

📦 Next.js Bundle Analysis for react-dev

This analysis was generated by the Next.js Bundle Analysis action. 🤖

Three Pages Changed Size

The following pages changed size from the code in this PR compared to its base branch:

Page	Size (compressed)	First Load
/404	77.41 KB (🟡 +26 B)	181.25 KB
/500	77.4 KB (🟡 +26 B)	181.25 KB
/[[...markdownPath]]	79.08 KB (🟡 +112 B)	182.93 KB

Details

Only the gzipped size is provided here based on an expert tip.

First Load is the size of the global bundle plus the bundle for the individual page. If a user were to show up to your website and land on a given page, the first load size represents the amount of javascript that user would need to download. If next/link is used, subsequent page loads would only need to download that page's bundle (the number in the "Size" column), since the global bundle has already been downloaded.

Any third party scripts you have added directly to your app using the <script> tag are not accounted for in this analysis

Next to the size is how much the size has increased or decreased compared with the base branch of this PR. If this percentage has increased by 10% or more, there will be a red status indicator applied, indicating that special attention should be given to this.

[forbiddenvoid]

Hi, I tried the steps you have mentioned in the how-to-contribute.md but they do not seem to be working for me. I think these are from the old react docs and does not apply to React 18. I tested this on the main branch commit hash 7aa45db6a2d30e62cf5ace08e17d971c8e8b977c. The paths build/node_modules/react and build/node_modules/react-dom are not present in the build directory after building packages. Am I missing something here ?

This PR is not intended (right now at least) to provide any updates to the contribution guide, but simply to move the existing guide, as-is, from the legacy docs site to react.dev. As near as I can tell, that guide hasn't been updated in nearly 2 years.

My instinct is that we are more likely to see updates to the instructions and guide if they live at the new docs site. It's possible this isn't the right approach. In practice, I'm not even sure that the React Core Team has the capacity right now to even support community contributions at anything more than a surface level, so all of this could be moot anyway.