Just want to mention that the only new content here is the documentation and coding section of the contribute guide & I'm not super attached to the language, I just wanted some content there to establish that the scope of that page is supposed to be introductory background/context setting/roadmapping for contributing and that other pages are where they can find the coding/doc/etc guides.
Also addresses part of this discussion#22866 (comment)

@timhoffm you might want to skim this since I move around the API guidelines a bit, but I don't change any guidelines. The changes I made specifically are:

• moved coding guidelines out ofcontribute.rst and intocoding_guidelines so that the page can be scoped to just coding guidelines.
• moved API changes guidelines into its own page b/c it is as long as every other section of the coding guide->my goal here is that it is a sort of standalone/self contained part of the guide, so making it its own page keeps it from overwhelming the rest of the coding guide.
• moved PR guidelines into it's own page b/c those guidelines apply to code and docs. My aim is also to reduce duplication between PR guidelines and coding guidelines by aggressively linking to coding guidelines and documentation guidelines and scoping PR guidelines to the PR process.

Owee, I'm MrMeeseeks, Look at me.

There seem to be a conflict, please backport manually. Here are approximate instructions:

1. Checkout backport branch and update it.

git checkout v3.8.xgit pull

2. Cherry pick the first parent branch of the this PR on top of the older branch:

git cherry-pick -x -m1 091e2ca2e7ab0f48b826c2b8c7fbdc920803ad9c

3. You will likely have some merge/cherry-pick conflict here, fix them and commit:

git commit -am 'Backport PR #27265: DOC: reorganizing contributing docs to clean up toc, better seperate topics'

4. Push to a named branch:

git push YOURFORK v3.8.x:auto-backport-of-pr-27265-on-v3.8.x

5. Create a PR against branch v3.8.x, I would have named this PR:

"Backport PR#27265 on branch v3.8.x (DOC: reorganizing contributing docs to clean up toc, better seperate topics)"

And apply the correct labels and milestones.

Congratulations — you did some good work! Hopefully your backport PR will be tested by the continuous integration and merged soon!

Remember to remove theStill Needs Manual Backport label once the PR gets merged.

If these instructions are inaccurate, feel free tosuggest an improvement.

Owee, I'm MrMeeseeks, Look at me.

There seem to be a conflict, please backport manually. Here are approximate instructions:

1. Checkout backport branch and update it.

git checkout v3.8.2-docgit pull

2. Cherry pick the first parent branch of the this PR on top of the older branch:

git cherry-pick -x -m1 091e2ca2e7ab0f48b826c2b8c7fbdc920803ad9c

3. You will likely have some merge/cherry-pick conflict here, fix them and commit:

git commit -am 'Backport PR #27265: DOC: reorganizing contributing docs to clean up toc, better seperate topics'

4. Push to a named branch:

git push YOURFORK v3.8.2-doc:auto-backport-of-pr-27265-on-v3.8.2-doc

5. Create a PR against branch v3.8.2-doc, I would have named this PR:

"Backport PR#27265 on branch v3.8.2-doc (DOC: reorganizing contributing docs to clean up toc, better seperate topics)"

And apply the correct labels and milestones.

Congratulations — you did some good work! Hopefully your backport PR will be tested by the continuous integration and merged soon!

Remember to remove theStill Needs Manual Backport label once the PR gets merged.

If these instructions are inaccurate, feel free tosuggest an improvement.

Removed the backport as doing this manually is not worth is IMHO.

Bonus ofmatplotlib/matplotlib.org#36 is that there's often no need to backport dev docs anymore 😁