“If I’d known a simple message was all that was needed, I would have done this myself” was a recent comment on GitHub. (I had copied the content of some tweets into GitHub. And yes, it was an issue we needed to dig into.) So just to make it clear.

If you find a bug and have a suggested fix, it does help the core team to create a pull request. We are working on some issues to make this faster for us to process. (For curious minds we do things like inject different licencing headers into CE and EE code. This has meant the external code is not identical to internal code, causing problems with merging public pull requests directly. We are working on getting this working better, along side getting Magento 2 dev beta ready to ship. No promises, but it is being worked on.)

If you find a bug but don’t have time to create a pull request, it is still useful to create a GitHub issue with as much detail as you can provide. The easier it is for us to understand and repeat, the faster we can get a fix done.

Getting bugs identified is valuable to the team, and the “developer beta” period coming up (it will kick off late December – watch for official announcements in the coming weeks) is all about showing off the Magento 2 work to date and getting feedback. What have we got right? What have we got wrong? This is our main chance to get the platform changes right. After this time the goal is to lock down the platform as much as possible so extension developers can start migrating their extensions. We cannot guarantee 100% stability, but certainly the goal is to be as stable as possible.

So how can you help make Magento 2 a success? Give Magento 2 a try. Provide feedback. If you have time to do a pull request that does save us time. The more details you can provide about problems also saves us time. But even a single sentence that clearly points out a bug will also save us time. It is cheaper to fix bugs earlier than later.

Where to submit issues? Please use the GitHub issue tracker: https://github.com/magento/magento2/issues.  Got a brilliant idea? Please use the same place for now. Lots going on internally, things are going to improve, but this is what we have today.

If you have a Magento 1 problem, sorry, if you have a support contract it describes how to make requests, otherwise my best advice is to try http://magento.stackexchange.com/. And if you get an answer, why not give back to the community and help answer someone else’s question? Every bit helps!