Contributing to GroupServer

Authors:Michael JasonSmith;
Contact:Michael JasonSmith <mpj17@onlinegroups.net>
Date:2016-08-09
Organization:GroupServer.org
Copyright:This document is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

Make GroupServer better: learn, discuss, advise, translate, and document without touching any code, but you can code as well!

Learn

The first step to contributing to GroupServer is to use GroupServer as a normal group member:

  • Join groups
  • Read and post using email and the web
  • Search topics and posts
  • Link to topics and posts
  • Update your profile

Become the local expert and help others make the most of GroupServer. You can then look for the opportunity to administer a group and site:

  • Invite and add people
  • Make topics sticky
  • Manage the members of a group
  • Change the group privacy to public, private, or secret
  • Start announcement, discussion, and support groups

Discuss

Tell others about GroupServer using your social networks. Tweet at @GroupServer to share the love. Join GroupServer Development and discuss how to make GroupServer more awesome.

Translate

Add to a translation, or start a translation team for a new language using Transifex, which is at the core of the internationalisation effort for GroupServer. (Currently there are translations for English, French, and German.)

Advise

Join GroupServer Development and give advice to others about how to run GroupServer. Running a mailing list manager is a new experience for many, but the issues — like running proxies, running a mail-transfer agent and running a relational database — can be solved by people with general system-administration experience.

Document

Post changes to the documentation in GroupServer Development, or change the docs on GitHub. (The documentation for GroupServer is written in reStructuredText — a plain-text format that is a lot like a wiki.)

Code

There are many layers of code in GroupServer, and you can contribute to any and all of them:

  • HTML is used for the pages, and the notifications,
  • JavaScript is used to provide the dynamic elements,
  • CSS is provides the styling,
  • Python does the hard work, and
  • SQL deals with the data.

Read the development guide and discuss your changes in GroupServer Development.