Redmine

Austen Ito wrote:

I was looking for an open source project to improve my rails skills and found Redmine to be interesting.

Welcome, we would love anyplace you can help.

I was wondering if anyone had any advice on figuring out what to work on? Is it better to submit patches for defects or features?

It's up to you. I tend to look at bugs before features but it depends on what area you want to work on. Redmine has several areas so it might be good to start in one and get some experience with it.

I recently posted about the order I tend use when working on Redmine and my plugins:

http://www.redmine.org/boards/1/topics/show/4118#message-4132

Maybe work on a plugin?

Plugins are great if you know Rails already. You might need to learn a bit about Redmine's data model first, I recently created some diagrams of the Model relationship that might be useful. Redmine Railroaded - Model and Controller diagrams

I'm enjoying running through the code so far and hopefully can contribute more as I go along.

To get started, right now Redmine could use some refactoring and RDocing of it's main methods. Those patches should be pretty easy to do and will really help to improve the core for the upcoming releases.

I found one issue that seemed like a good place to start, http://www.redmine.org/issues/show/2660 , and submitted a patch.

I'll take a look at it and see. I'll be starting to use GitHub for patches soon, if you want to send me something jsut send me a pull request. It might take a couple of weeks but I'll get back to you or merge it into the svn core.

Thanks for your interest, I look forward to seeing your contributions.

Eric

Hi Eric,
Thanks for the quick reply. Starting on documentation and some refactoring would be a good way start on familiarizing myself with the code base. Are there any documentation/coding conventions to follow? I didn't see any in the guide: [[http://www.redmine.org/wiki/redmine/Guide]]

Pull requests seem to be an easier way to contribute via github. I'll use pull requests instead of patching for the time being.

Thanks,
austen

Austen Ito wrote:

Hi Eric,
Thanks for the quick reply. Starting on documentation and some refactoring would be a good way start on familiarizing myself with the code base. Are there any documentation/coding conventions to follow? I didn't see any in the guide: http://www.redmine.org/wiki/redmine/Guide

Pull requests seem to be an easier way to contribute via github. I'll use pull requests instead of patching for the time being.

Thanks,
austen

Sorry, added the wrong link. http://www.redmine.org/wiki/redmine/Guide

Austen Ito wrote:

Are there any documentation/coding conventions to follow?

Just follow the regular Ruby and Rails conventions. One thing to keep in mind is that Redmine's audience (and developers) are international so try to stick to standard English (e.g. no slang, abbreviations, or made up words).

Eric

One more thing, I'm always on the IRC channel and can take a few minutes to help guide you if you have any questions. #redmine on freenode.net

Eric

Excellent. Thanks.

austen