There is one more way to customize Redmine—to modify Redmine itself, thus sharing your customization with other users. Any contribution is very important for free and open source projects, such as Redmine. An active and passionate community is what makes such projects good.
When most people hear about contribution to a free and open source project, they assume contribution in the form of some development, but in fact, there are many more areas where people can help. For example, this book helps Redmine by spreading information about it, teaching how to use it, and demonstrating its capabilities. Also, you have already helped Redmine by purchasing this book, not only because you can become a potential fan of this project, but also because Packt Publishing—the company that publishes this book—will pay a royalty to the Redmine team.
So let's discuss how else you can help Redmine:
- As it has already been mentioned, let's start with development. If you are a developer, you can help by contributing code or patches to Redmine. To be able to do this, you should be familiar with Ruby and Rails. But even if you are familiar with Perl, you can still help by improving
Redmine.pm. You can help even more if you know HTML/CSS and/or JavaScript because these technologies are intensively used by Redmine and may need improvements. If you are familiar with neither of the aforementioned technologies, you can still help by, for example, developing a REST API client library for Redmine using the technologies that you are familiar with.Here are some links regarding development for Redmine:
- General information: http://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/wiki/Contribute
- Subversion repository: https://svn.redmine.org/redmine
- Git repository: https://github.com/redmine/redmine
- If you are a designer, you can make new themes for Redmine. This is an extremely important area, as good themes attract more users.
- You can write articles, blog posts, tutorials, and books, improve the source code documentation (it uses RDoc), and more. You can do this in English or any other language.
- Regarding other languages. You can also translate Redmine, its official or unofficial tutorials, and so on, into other languages.
- If you are just a user or are going to become a user of Redmine, do not hesitate to report bugs or suggest new features. If you are not sure whether something is a bug, you are still advised to open a discussion in the Redmine forum and ask the community. Many bugs are hard to find and not many people report them.
- Finally, you can show your support for Redmine by making a donation.
In a very similar way, you can help many free and open source plugins for Redmine.