How you can help

From Gramps
Revision as of 08:40, 23 July 2007 by Romjerome (talk | contribs) (But what if I don't know how to program?)
Jump to: navigation, search
Gramps-notes.png
This page has good information but needs a cleanup. Please make the Gramps Wiki more useful by re‑organizing this page and linking introductory material. Consider also updating the screenshots.

Why we need help

We have become victims of our own success. Over the past couple of years, GRAMPS has grown to thousands of users. Demands for support and enhancements are increasing each day. Unfortunately, the development team had not grown in the same manner. This year, over 90% of all commits have been done by five people.

Forward progress on the project is slowing due to the increasing support load. In order to continue to support the needs of the community, we need additional support.

What you can do to help

Below is a list of programming tasks that we need to have accomplished. If you can help, please let us know.

Report enhancements
Several of the existing reports need to be enhanced. We have three separate Ancestor reports, all of which are similar, but not quite complete. Each report we have now needs to be enhanced and cleaned up.
Enhanced LaTeX support
Right now our LaTeX support is a bit weak, and does not properly handle the Unicode character set.
Improved GEDCOM import and export
It seems that no matter how hard we work at it, there is something that always needs to be improved.
Resolving bug reports
Bug reports arrive all the time, often several a day. Resolving bug reports is a major way in which you can help the team to be able to spend more time enhancing the system.

But what if I don't know how to program?

Even if you don't know how to program, you can still help out with the project. You can:

Develop database test cases
We need sample databases that handle all the features of the program.
Help with interface testing
Either testing the interface by hand, or help writing dogtail tests for automated testing.
Write tutorials on wiki
How I do ..., Tutorials, Tips.
Develop screencasts
vnc2swf, recordmydesktop, Istanbul, Cankiri, VLC, byzanz, xvidcap, gifsicle or SWFTools programs can be used to create screen movies that could be used to show people how to perform different tasks.

Also, seems that W3C work on specifications for Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language and a video markup could be added on HTML5...

Provide a translation
GRAMPS supports many languages, but the more languages we support, the more we serve our community.
Package the program for a distribution
Installing GRAMPS from source code is more than most new users can handle. If you can provide a package for your system, it will make it easier for new users to starting using GRAMPS.
Write documentation
If you have writing skills, we could use your help in improving the User's Manual.
Participate on the mailing lists
If the users of the community can answer each other's questions, it can significantly reduce the load on the developers.
Help on the wiki
As a user of GRAMPS, you will gain knowledge of the reports, how they work, and how they can be made better. Help out to expand and improve this wiki site with any information that will make it more useful.