Contribute
The existence and growth of an open source project is dependant upon the freely contributed time, talents and energies of the developers and the user community. If the developers OR the community stop contributing the project would die.
Contents
Help Us and We'll Help You
Those who contributing to the project will be given higher priority for help and support. They will also have a stronger voice in determining the future of PhpGedView and their feature requests will receive a higher priority from the developers.
The best way to contribute to the project is to become involved in the community. You can get involved in several ways depending on your skills and commitment.
Helping out on the PGVWiki
See PGVWiki:Community_Portal for a list of tasks to be undertaken.
Documentation is something that is often overlooked in open source software as most time is spent of developing and enhancing the software. Using the PGVWiki you can contribute easily to help increase documentation coverage. Currently, documentation and all things PhpGedView are spread across different websites. We are attempting to consolidate all this information into the wiki such that it becomes the main source of all PhpGedView related matter.
Requirements
- No programming skills are required
- Some familiarity with editing wiki pages is helpful, but by no means necessary
The main thing is to get things moved over to the wiki and enhance and update already existing pages. Don't be afraid of doing things "wrong", there is no such thing with a wiki. There are people on hand that can move and organise pages as well as adding more advanced wiki elements to pages - com'on just start editing!
Forums
Help other users and increase your understanding of PhpGedView by reading and answering questions in the help forums or on the mailing list.
Help with translation
Translation is a difficult task and most translators are happy to have any extra help you are willing to provide.
Requirements
- Be able to translate from English to another language
Provide Bug Reports
If you use PhpGedView or are the administrator of a PhpGedView website, you can help by providing bug reports for all (hopefully not too many) those annoying things you find along the way. This will help us to improve the software and help improve the PhpGedView experience for everyone.
Beta Testing
New features are being added to the developmental code in CVS all the time. We need people willing to help test new features in beta or CVS code. The more input we have for this, the better the final product will be. As a beta tester you will get to preview the new and exciting features coming in the next release.
Disclaimer
Beta testing by nature is to try to identify bugs in those new features in order to expel them before general release into onto the public. Therefore, you should not beta test PhpGedView with your important data!
Basic Bug Reporting Requirements
- No programming skills are required
If you notice something that doesn't work correctly, please report it! You just need to be able to take a little time to explain what you were doing when you found the bug - If we can't reproduce it, we probably can't fix it.
Bug Fixing Requirements
If you have knowledge about some of the above you should be able to start helping out with locating known bugs and fixing them.
Helping out Financially
As with all open source software, PhpGedView development relies on the hard work of developers who contribute their own time, free of charge. In addition, supplying the web space and tools for developers to collaborate costs money - if you use PhpGedView and find it useful, please find it in your heart to make a donation, no matter how small.
