Calling all coders!
It’s been wonderful to see so many new members joining our community over the past few days, particularly all of you coming from Google+. <3
You might already have noticed that diaspora* is missing some features that you’d really like to use.
As an open-source Free Software project, diaspora* is created by its community. Now that you’re part of this community, we’d love you to help us improve it for everyone.
Our team of volunteer developers spends all the time they can spare working on diaspora*. But there’s always a lot more work to do. The main issue that slows the pace of development is simply developer time. To increase developer time and so increase the speed of development, we need more developers!
Help us improve the software
If you can code, or want to learn, we’d like to hear from you! diaspora* is built on Ruby on Rails, with many JavaScript elements. Have a look at our guide to contributing to diaspora*.
- Get in touch with our core team before you start work on anything to discuss your proposed contribution. That way we can make sure that your contribution will fit well into the existing structure.
- Issues that involve federation (such as post editing, or groups) are usually pretty complex, so it might be a good idea to start with simpler issues until you’ve become familiar with the code and diaspora* itself.
- We manage development via GitHub’s issue tracker. Look especially for issues tagged with the help wanted and newcomer labels.
Other ways you can help
If you don’t code, there are still plenty more ways you can help diaspora*’s development.
- If you know someone who can code, and you think they might be interested in contributing to this project, tell them about diaspora* and encourage them to consider helping!
- If there is a missing feature that’s really important to you, put a bounty on it to encourage someone else to build it! We use Bountysource for this.
- If you have a bit of admin experience, how about setting up your own pod?
- If you speak a language other than English, help us translate diaspora* into that language.
- Another great way you can help the project grow is by spreading the word. If you still have accounts on other social networks, tell people there about diaspora* and encourage any coders there to take a look at the project.
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