How you can help/cs

2010-01-01T14:17:30Z

Meridius:

{{languages|How you can help}}
How can you contribute to GRAMPS?

==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.

; 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. If you are a GEDCOM expert contact the developers.
; 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.
; Integrate mapview (openstreetmap, google maps): with those tools available and the locations in GRAMPS there are tons of opportunities.
; Profiling the application on large datasets, and speed improvements
; Import data, merging duplicates: if more sources are used and data is imported from those sources, it is sometimes very hard to find duplicate data.

==Web 2.0==
The new buzzword: '''Web2.0'''. Some '''collaboration''' added to GRAMPS would be great obviously. People who build webapplications could certainly help us enormously. The idea is to have a webbased tool that could export .gramps files (independant of GRAMPS or just other developers) and would have the possibility to move back and forth. A sort of import with an automatic merge would be really, really, needed. This is '''the one recurring theme''' in comments on GRAMPS .

==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: Here is where you can make '''the most valuable contributions'''.
As a user you can best explain how you go about and sharing this knowledge is a great thing to do. As a user of GRAMPS, you will gain knowledge of the reports, how they work, and how they can be made better.

{{man tip|1=Wiki manual|2=Please enhance the {{man label|Wiki}} - particularly the manual section.}}

[[:Category:How_do_I|How I do ...]], [[:Category:Tutorials|Tutorials]], [[:Category:Tips|Tips]].
; Develop screencasts: [http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/vnc2swf/ vnc2swf], [http://recordmydesktop.sourceforge.net/ recordmydesktop], [http://live.gnome.org/Istanbul Istanbul], [http://www.tortall.net/mu/wiki/Cankiri Cankiri], [http://www.techmag.biz/capturing_screen_VLC_screencasting VLC], [http://people.freedesktop.org/~company/byzanz/ byzanz], [http://xvidcap.sourceforge.net/ xvidcap], gifsicle or [http://www.swftools.org/ SWFTools] programs can be used to create screen movies that could be used to show people how to perform different tasks.
Also, seems that [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web_Consortium W3C] work on specifications for [http://www.w3.org/AudioVideo/ Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language] and a video markup could be added on [http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#video HTML5]...
; Provide a translation: GRAMPS supports many languages, but the more languages we support, the more we serve our community. See also [[Portal:Translators| Translators]]
; 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.
; Participate on the mailing lists: If the users of the community can answer each others questions, it can significantly reduce the load on the developers.

[[Category:Documentation]]
[[Category:Developers/General]]

How you can help/cs

2010-01-01T14:11:35Z

Meridius: New page: {{languages|How_you_can_help}}