Contributing

Anyone can contribute to the ongoing efforts to improve PostgreSQL for the Mac.  There are so many things to do that there is no way one or two people can do it all, particularly not as unpaid volunteers.   A project like this is an enormous undertaking.  If you think  about it, it breaks down into parts that many people can work on, even if you aren't a programmer.

Regardless of your skills, if you'd like to contribute in any capacity, the place to start is the discussion mailing list on SourceForge.net.

Art

So you can't write code, but you've got art skills?  Excellent.  We need help making the documentation pretty and usable.   The icons in the applications need some help too.  Oh and if you have some creative ideas on improving the presentation of the screens, air them, creating a beautiful interface that gets away from the same old same old is just as important as having excellent functionality.  Look at Delicious Library, it does what it does well, but also does it in a pretty way.

Code

If you are a programmer, or are learning to program, feel free to jump in and get your feet wet.  Download the 'developer' tar from SourceForge (this installs the static linked libraries in /opt/local that the projects build against).  Grab the latest code from SVN, and make sure you can build pgCocoaDB and Query Tool.  If those work, then you are ready to roll.   There are a ton of projects, both new and in the existing code that need to be addressed, as well as many that we haven't even thought about yet.  Jump on Discussion and let's talk about them.

* More example programs

Documentation

Like most open source projects, documentation is an achilles heel.  Writing documentation is a time consuming process that doesn't get bugs fixed or features added.  Because of this, documentation is anemic at best.  This is one area where people don't realize how much a help a non-programmer, literate user can be of help to an Open Source effort.  You don't need any special skills to write documentation.  In fact, if you want to write the docs in a text editor, or html (the form they will be published in), feel free.

Using & Testing

Believe it or not, this is the most important contribution.  If you use any part of the project and discover a bug, issue or even a feature that needs to exist, providing a good bug report is the most valuable contribution you can make. 

Filing these reports allows the development team to know about the issues, and to fix them as they appear.   Filing good feature requests helps us to map out the priority and projects that need to be completed.

Money

As much as we hate to admit it, monetary contributions help too.  Druware Software Designs has absorbed the costs of the bandwidth and some of the development time.   That will continue.

There are two ways to contribute monetarily, the first is the contribute to the project or the developers on the project via SourceForge.net.  The other is to purchase a support package from Druware Software Designs.  The money to Druware goes towards hardware and full-time support staff.  Money donated through SourceForge goes directly to the volunteers in the SourceForge project. You can download a year to date of our budget here.