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How to contribute

Added by Eric Davis about 15 years ago

I've just started a page on some of the ways to contribute back to Redmine. I'll be improving it over time but I wanted to get a list of some common tasks that I can direct people to. If you're interested in contributing but need help finding something specific to do, post a comment in this thread with the following and I'll try to point you in a general direction.

  • what interests you (e.g. plugin development, documentation)
  • your experience with Redmine, Ruby on Rails, and anything else (e.g. several years experience, new to it but wanting to learn)

Eric


Replies (80)

RE: How to contribute - Added by Niklas ... over 14 years ago

Hi,
I have a few questions:
  • First of all: how does communication go during development? Are there any regular chat meetings or alike one could attend to see how things are going and what is being worked on?
  • then given I want to work on the "core", does that still go through patches or is there a way one gets push access at some point?
  • also I was wondering if there is any funding involved or if everyone's just doing this in their free time. more specifically: is there a way to get paid for working on redmine? (just curious)

A bit about me: I'm coding for ~7 years now, and am into rails for ~2.5 years. I've worked a lot on crabgrass, in the core for about a year, but lately only plugins and site-specific adjustments.

-- niklas

RE: How to contribute - Added by Eric Davis over 14 years ago

Niklas:

Thanks for asking, these are good questions.

  • First of all: how does communication go during development? Are there any regular chat meetings or alike one could attend to see how things are going and what is being worked on?

Most of the communication is done in the forums and issue tracker. You should be able to subscribe to email updates, but there is a lot of information that comes in everyday. I'm also in the IRC channel most of the time (#redmine on Freenode) and can answer questions or discuss ideas.

  • then given I want to work on the "core", does that still go through patches or is there a way one gets push access at some point?

It really depends on the changes. I have commit rights but I'll still submit patches for a code review in order to work through the best design.

  • also I was wondering if there is any funding involved or if everyone's just doing this in their free time. more specifically: is there a way to get paid for working on redmine? (just curious)

There is no funding directly involved but I do run a business that specializes in custom Redmine development (Little Stream Software). Several of my plugins were sponsored by third parties and I now maintain them for the benefit of the community.

A bit about me: I'm coding for ~7 years now, and am into rails for ~2.5 years. I've worked a lot on crabgrass, in the core for about a year, but lately only plugins and site-specific adjustments.

Welcome to the community. Let me know if you have any questions or need some more direction.

Eric Davis

RE: How to contribute - Added by Ngewi Fet about 14 years ago

I think Niklas raises an important point: How does the communication work?
How is it determined what issues (and patches) will be adopted?

Also, How does an issue get attention.

The contribute page points to available patches which can be updated to work with the latest version of Redmine.

I can do that, but then what happens next?
Will those patches only sit around to get out-dated again? Or will they be eventually used? I would be nice if patches are marked for importance so that effort can be properly directed at updating the patches that matter.

Thanks for starting this discussion Eric.

Ngewi

RE: How to contribute - Added by Eric Davis about 14 years ago

Ngewi Fet wrote:

I think Niklas raises an important point: How does the communication work?

Most of the communication is on the issue tracker. I try to go through the forums too but I'm pretty backed up right now (1500+ emails from them). There are a few informal discussions on IRC and I'm thinking about hosting some regular "meetings" there too.

How is it determined what issues (and patches) will be adopted?

The most important issues are assigned to an upcoming version (e.g. 1.0). After that, it's mostly bugs and up to each developer. For example, I've been doing a lot of work in the LDAP section and getting parts of Redmine ready for a REST API.

I can do that, but then what happens next?
Will those patches only sit around to get out-dated again? Or will they be eventually used? I would be nice if patches are marked for importance so that effort can be properly directed at updating the patches that matter.

There's always the risk of a patch getting out of date. If you can post the patches to a branch based on the git mirror, I can easily update them using git rebase.

Thanks for starting this discussion Eric.

No problem, sorry I haven't been able to give more direction.

Eric Davis

RE: How to contribute - Added by Lucas Tolchinsky about 14 years ago

Hi there! My name is Lucas Tolchinsky and we are using Redmine to manage our projects here at Vurbia Technologies. I was asked to add a small thing to the Overview section: when a README.markdown is present on the repository, the content should be displayed.
To do so, I used the BlueCloth gem that compiles markdown to html and is working fine! If you are interested in the patch, let me know! You can write me to

RE: How to contribute - Added by Alex Last almost 14 years ago

I have some questions about Time Tracking feature.
  • Is there a tutorial how to use it? Estimated time, spend time, %%done, etc - all these fields do not seem to be correlated now.
  • Is there a roadmap for it? what's planned to be implemented in the future versions?
  • Is it stable enough to be used in production?
    Can it be used to answer questions like:
  • what's the remaining development time for version X of my project? I need both bulk work hours remaining and also the calendar dates basing on the current assignments - if task A is assigned to dev1 and is estimated to take 80 work hours, I'd like to see the estimated completion date of the project to be not earlier than 2 weeks from now.
  • how accurate were the original time estimates?
  • which tasks have "overtime" (time spent is more than originally estimated)

I really like Redmine issue tracking features. Nice job, guys.
But now I'm trying to understand if Redmine can be used as a project management tool as well.
Does the Redmine team have a vision on this or this is something not really designed and not planned to be implemented anytime soon? I can help with the requirements definitions for this.

RE: How to contribute - Added by Alexander Lobunets almost 14 years ago

Hello there!

As a side-project in our development team we have created a simple tracking app which is unfortunately not (yet?) using the Redmine API. The source code is available here: http://github.com/oleksandr/RedLog

We hope that can be some kind of contribution. Web tracking is nice, but based on our experience and feedback from several teams is not efficient and usable. That was the main reason why we spent few evenings to create a basic app.

Hope it would be useful for someone.

Cheers.

RE: How to contribute - Added by britney roberts almost 14 years ago

I appreciate the concern which is been rose. The things need to be sorted out because it is about the individual but it can be with everyone

========
britney

[[http://mls.fastrealestate.net]]

RE: How to contribute - Added by Alain Alain091 almost 14 years ago

Hello,
I'm Alain from Paris suburbs.

I have an experience with cms and web development on PHP5 + mySQL and MVC frameworks with JQuery + Prototype

I recently discover Redmine and want contribute beginning with issues fixing to learn Rails.

I feel confortable with MVC but I have to learn more on Rails/Ruby architecture.

I recently post few patches correcting defects in UI.

RE: How to contribute - Added by Victor Dulepov almost 14 years ago

We're using Redmine locally for development, and so far have created some goodies which we packed as plugins for easing updates/deployments.
I posted them to the wiki and the Plugin List, but I don't think I have enough permissions to place the wikipages under appropriate parent (no Rename Page), so they appear under the root.
Can somebody of the core team please set their parent to Plugin List?. Two pages as of now - PluginShowIssueDescriptions and PluginSidebarIssueControl

RE: How to contribute - Added by Felix Schäfer almost 14 years ago

Victor Doulepov wrote:

Can somebody of the core team please set their parent to Plugin List?. Two pages as of now - PluginShowIssueDescriptions and PluginSidebarIssueControl

Done. Thanks for the plugins :-)

RE: How to contribute - Added by jason mandrix over 13 years ago

Eric Davis wrote:

Anton Nepomnyaschih wrote:

But I concern about community of the project. There is only Jean, who commits something in trunk of Redmine. What if Jean will suddenly stop working on the project? Who has access to Redmine's SVN repository? Will the project live forever? =)

I also have commit rights to the svn repository but I'm not as active in the core as Jean-Philippe. I also maintain the git mirror on GitHub so the repository will always be available.

In case, if our company will migrate to Redmine, I'm sure - we will contribute many things (we are software development company that likes to contribute something to open-source ;) ). But I want to know, how the contributing is structured - community is very important for open-source projects like Redmine, I think.

The Contribute page lists some areas we are looking for help with. Any code contributions should be sent to the issue tracker, either as an attachment to an existing issue or a new "Patch" issue. Right now, we really need some people to help triage the issues list. Like review patches to see if they apply to the latest trunk, if they have tests, etc.

Eric

If the wiki is a problem to keep in sync, maybe more custom reports and a better triage cold help.However, I don't mind starting out with documentation if it helps understanding the code base better. they are similar but not the same. So I'd add an issue relation between all three. That would help the developers see the group as a whole and try to fix them all at once.

[URL redacted, don't spam. See ForumCodeOfConduct]

RE: How to contribute - Added by Terence Mill almost 13 years ago

We use redmine and already translated 50 % percent of the guide.
We would offer to share this and future work with the community if someone of the team would create an editable Wiki site for german translation here" and link it also here

Give me a sign.

RE: How to contribute - Added by Terence Mill almost 13 years ago

Sry, link shall be /projects/redmine/wiki/DeGuide

Terence Mill wrote:

We use redmine and already translated 50 % percent of the guide.
We would offer to share this and future work with the community if someone of the team would create an editable Wiki site for german translation here" and link it also here

Give me a sign.

RE: How to contribute - Added by Felix Schäfer almost 13 years ago

Terence Mill wrote:

Sry, link shall be /projects/redmine/wiki/DeGuide

Last time I looked everyone should be able to start a new Wiki page, so you should be able to start DeGuide yourself. Once you have, it can be linked to from the global Guide page.

RE: How to contribute - Added by Eugene Kharkov over 12 years ago

We just developed a feature that could be a good add-on to a recently released "private issues". It's "private note". Due the fact Ruby and Rails are not our strong side, we modified the Redmine code instead of creating a plugin. I believe this feature may be interested to many developers as it lets you to communicate privately within a "public" task. We would be happy to provide our code to someone who can either submit the code into the Redmine SVN or create a plugin. We can provide our code as a SVN patch so you can see which lines were modified.

RE: How to contribute - Added by Terence Mill over 12 years ago

Just provide ur patch via the issue #1554 as .patch file. Its already on the roadmap.
Tx.

RE: How to contribute - Added by Eugene Kharkov over 12 years ago

Okay, the path is attached to the issue.

RE: How to contribute - Added by Anonymous over 12 years ago

I'm new to Redmine and Ruby on Rails, but I'm definitely going to be dedicating some time to learn. Right now, I'm pilot testing Redmine at my company (an engineering and geology firm that has little to do with software development). I've noticed that Redmine's very development-focused, but I've also noticed that it's a solid project management product in general.

So I'll be poking around (along with about 15 corporate-style pilot testers) and probably developing a few patches that tweak the system more in the direction of traditional corporate project structure. I'd definitely like to collaborate and contribute to the broader Redmine community as much as possible throughout this effort. So I'd love to get hooked up with anyone who might be looking at doing similar things. A few enhancements I'm already thinking I'll have to develop or find are:

  • Issue Recurrence
  • Issue Templates
  • Email notifications of upcoming or past due dates (along with a number of other "advanced notification" ideas)
  • A number of tweaks to ensure users don't ever see an issue ID
  • Possibly a number of tools geared toward ERP-style things (resource loading, etc)
  • Vocabulary changes ("Issues" > "Tasks", "Versions" > "Milestones")
  • I'm sure a number of lockdown tweaks all over the place to make projects less "open" by default so that we can give our clients logins and ensure they can't do very much except look at how on-schedule we are.

I think this is a solid system, and I'm very happy that I'm getting some time allocated to fool around with it and try to make it work for my company.

RE: How to contribute - Added by Wayne Allen over 12 years ago

This site has been very helpful. I would be lost without the info here.

RE: How to contribute - Added by Khong Yew Chong over 12 years ago

This could be of some help. I was looking for some ideas on this.

RE: How to contribute - Added by Yusdenis Sánchez over 12 years ago

I've been working with Ruby on Rails, redmine specifically for one year. I developed some redmine plugins in my institution. I wonder, how it could contribute to the development of the redmine app?

Greetings, Yusdenis Sánchez Perodín

RE: How to contribute - Added by rickey bradley over 12 years ago

I would be interested in contributing but I have no experience in rails. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
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RE: How to contribute - Added by faries qi about 12 years ago

I've went through all contributors activities and found that they have access to repository.

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RE: How to contribute - Added by lovely scott about 12 years ago

It`s free, powerfull and provide a lot customization and extensable features. Third-party features is rational to implement through plugins, than change the core code, - it is avoid problems when others in your team also would like to customize redmine or when you would like update your instance in future. By "escort passport 9500ix":<spamlink removed by Jan Niggemann>

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