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.
Read what developers of Adium think constitutes Adium.
See FollowingDevelopment for more information about development and discussion.
1. Coding
The main means of contributing to Adium is coding, i.e. submitting patches. Visit the dedicated article for details.
2. Other ways of contributing
a) Artwork and Design
Like most open source projects, we have a hard time finding talented artists and designers to make icons, improve the website, etc... We'd love to have your help!
See for example IconsNeeded.
b) Code documentation
You can get a copy of the latest Doxygen output at our website.
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).
c) Localization
Bilingual, trilingual, or überlingual? See Localization for information on translating Adium into your native language or improving existing translations.
d) 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.
e) 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.
f) 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 caffeine, pizza, etc.