Adium

Contributing to Adium

Want to help make the best instant messaging client even better? Adium is developed and licensed under the GNU GPL open source license. Its developers and contributors are volunteers. The Adium team is always looking for new additions and resources.

The Adium development mailing list and the #adium on IRC are the appropriate venues for development discussion. Members of #adium may be willing to provide help with users' problems; the mailing list is not a support forum, and requests for help with non-development related problems will not be answered there. Thanks for keeping the list on-topic and productive!

Coding

Adium itself is written in the Objective-C language  using Apple's Cocoa frameworks. The libpurple protocol library which provides connectivity on many instant messaging services is written in C.

If you have experience in any of these languages -- or you want to learn -- and you want to contribute, dive right in! Getting Adium Source explains how to retrieve the Adium source code, and Contributing Code outlines our patch policy by which you can submit changes for review and approval by the Adium team. Continued contributors are often invited to join the team and thereby have direct write access to the code repository (not to mention international acclaim and the eternal jealousy of their peers).

  • Some handy tips & tricks can be found here.

If you're making an external / third party plugin,

Code documentation

Our code is not as well-documented as we'd like, and we have a lot of it. If you can read Objective-C, we'd like you to help; see Doxygenation and CodingStyle (the latter of which describes our preferred documentation style).

Localization

Bilingual, trilingual, or überlingual? See Localization for information on translating Adium into your native language or improving existing translations.

Bug and request management

You're reading this via the Trac ticket management system which we use to keep track of bugs and requests. Adium's popularity comes at a price: many users want to see additions to the program, and a small but important percentage experience problems. If you want to contribute time but aren't a programmer, consider helping us triage bugs and requests, mark duplicates, and reliably reproduce problems.

View Tickets from the bar at the top of the page offers reports on open tickets; the Roadmap can also be a useful way to view tickets which have already been targeted for a future release. As a registered user, you can comment in tickets (for example, to specify how to reproduce a bug or to note that this ticket is a duplicate of that one). See Bug Triaging for hints on how to keep tickets up to date.

Documentation

Did you want to know how to do something and find that the documentation didn't explain it or didn't explain it well? We're happy to accept additions to the documentation; simply create a ticket with the text and either a link to the existing page or a request for a new page.

Donations

Adium is and always will be free to use on free instant messaging networks, with no obligation or expectation of monetary support. Donations encourage further development and will be used toward operating expenses, hardware for better development, and, if surplus, toward hardware/caffeine/pizza/etc.