Revision as of 12:03, 16 May 2008

Did you know you to can help contributing to MythTV?

Everyone has one or more skills to help improving MythTV. You just have to remember that MythTV is a combination of technical and non-technical efforts. Independent from your skills, there is always something you can do to help make MythTV even beter than it is right now.

Besides more developers we also need people to work on manuals and documentation, layout and design, wiki pages, translations and more. Join us making MythTV even beter than it already is.

The following list contains a selection where we need to work on for the improvement of MythTV. Choose how you can help best.

Things you can do to help

Software developing

Required skills: light to heavy understanding of programming

Of course there is enough software development to do. The work varies from debugging, optimizing to developing new features. You can find out all about this in:

• The Development guide.
• Developer Documentation.

Documenting new and existing features

Required skills: familiar with using MythTV

Documentation often lags behind features. The mythtv-commits mailing list provides information on what has been coded into the system recently and updating documentation here or in the official docs on mythtv.org is a welcome contribution.

Improving the manual

Required skills: non technical

The user manual helps people to start and work with MythTV. There's a project underway to create a User Manual which is starting to pick up steam. If you know something about MythTV, you can help extending and updating the manual. You can find the manual here.

The manual is available via the wiki pages, if you are not familiar with using a wiki than you can learn it in no-time here

Maintaining the Wiki (this site)

Required skills: non technical

If you are not familiar with using a wiki than you can learn it in no-time here.

You can help writing and editing material right here on the Wiki.

• Help completing pages that are marked incomplete. You can find an complete list of incomplete pages here.
• Review and update existing pages
• Look around and improve the wiki structure. By improving the Structure you help people finding the right information and makes or easier to keep things simple, organized and up-to-date.

Improve the screenshots page

Required skills: non technical

Screenshots are important for new users to get familiar with MythTV. The Screenshots page needs to be fleshed out, preferably illustrating the default theme as well as a couple of others, and at least one widescreen. Where possible it would be good to add short notes beside the screenshots to help visitors understand them correctly.

Promoting MythTV (Bring MythTV to the rest of us)

Required skills: non technical, basic internet usage.

Help us bringing MythTV to the rest of us by writing articles, references, talking in forums, etc.

It's also a good idea to post MythTV in news groups as an HTPC or Mediacenter solution. A lot of people just don't know about the existence of MythTV and the possibilities.

Internationalizing/translating

Required skills: non technical, understands one or more languages

If you have language skills, you can work on internationalizing/translating the product. This is needed in the core system as well as the modules.

Testing MythTV

Required skills: non technical, some understanding of MythTV

Beta testing new features is always appreciated. One does not need to be a developer to pull code from SVN and compile it - but you do need to be aware that going to SVN code implies a certain responsibility on the user's part to debug their own problems, file useful bugreports, and be able to downgrade or upgrade accordingly to fix issues.

Create themes for MythTV

Required skills: Light technical knowlegde, some feeling for layout and design

If you are interested in creating a new theme, than you can find all you need to know in the following pages:

• theme development guide - All about creating new themes.
• Theme menu development guide - how to work with Theme menu's.
• Theme Category page - Example themes and more links to relevant pages.

Building plugins

Required skills: Light to heavy programming knowlegde

You can find more information about how you can build your own plug-in for MythTV (or convert and existing program)in the Plug-in_developers_guide

In general people find this a nice way to start developing on MythTV.

Technical documentation

Required skills: Some understanding of programming

Documentation often lags behind... help keeping this up-to-date.