Want to contribute?
WONDERFUL!
You’ve used free.zanby.com, or one of the many communities we power, and you want to help keep the project moving forward.
But you’re not quite sure where to start, or what would be useful, or if we’re interested. Note: We’re interested!
Or maybe you only have a teeny bit of time to contribute (aka “Drive-By Contributions”). Or maybe you’d like to contribute some tasty non-code goodies. Or maybe you’d like to help out with a monetary or other donation.
Fantastic!
A good place to start is to browse over the open issues list in redmine: these are issues that the core developers believe need to be addressed in a timely manner. You’ll find a mix of easy, medium, and challenging things to sink your teeth into depending upon how much time you have to contribute.
If nothing on the redmine list excites you, below are a few other ideas that can really help out.
- We need
- testers
- writers (help with the wiki, forums, howtos)
- designers and IA folk
- coders (take a look at redmine for ideas, or contribute your own!)
- sysadmins
- gurus on the forums
- real live implementations (free-dot, rework, countywide, etc)
Testing
You love breaking things. As a kid, you took things apart, just to see how many ways you could get the springs to bounce. (cool!) We can sure use your help!
Even though we’re continually trying to improve our testing, we know there are a ton of features in here. We also know that you are going to come up with ways to use (and break) Zanby that we never thought of. When you find something, let us know on the forums, or create a new issue in the redmine tracker.
The easiest place to start testing is on one of the existing implementations. http://free.zanby.com has a mostly-current release of the code, and has most of the core features enabled. Or, you can experiment with our demonstration multiple-brand site at climate networks. Or, let us know that you are interested in volunteering for bughunting, and we will turn you loose on one of our testing instances on zanbylab.
Whether it’s a failure of the code, or a flaw in the docs, or just something that is too ugly for words, let us know, and we appreciate that you’ve taken the time to test!
Documentation
hmm. Our existing documentation might be politely described as “quaint”. It is lacking something. Clarity. Completeness. Accuracy. Ok, lots of somethings. If you can write, or can create outlines, or can explain things, we want your help! Send us an email or find us in the forums, and we’ll get you started.
Bug Triage
All projects have bugs. Ours has lots.
Part of keeping a project vibrant is to ensure that bugs are made visible, that bugs are prioritized, that bugs are continually reviewed and fixed, and that the fixes are peer reviewed before being committed to stable, released code. In addition to fixes done by the core developers, it’s crucial that other community members with a desire to keep the project healthy be enabled to help in the ongoing fixes and enhancements. You can join in our ongoing bug sort, triage, and fix, at our redmine tracker.
Contributing Code
We are using github: git://github.com/zanby/Zanby.git
We love contributions. We have been using and contributing to other great projects (like Drupal, Redmine and WordPress) for years.
Here are the steps to contribute:
- Fork the project http://help.github.com/fork-a-repo/
- Clone down your fork (
git clone git://github.com/zanby/zanby.git) - Create a topic branch to contain your change (
git checkout -b my_awesome_feature) - Hack away, add tests. Not necessarily in that order.
- Make sure everything still passes by running
rake <Artem / Stas, comments on this?> - Push the branch up (
git push origin my_awesome_feature) - Create an issue in our redmine tracker, with a description and link to your branch, and flag it as a push request.
UI & Graphics
Looks matter. And let’s face it, ours need help.
If you’ve got a talent for the visual, or know how to make a workflow actually work, and see an area that could use a little help, we’d love to hear from you! Whip up a rough draft and let us know at the forums If you’re interested in deeper IA, we’ve got a ton of the old visios we used for the original wireframes. We’re happy to share these with you, just find us in the forums and let us know.