On Fri, 2003-10-31 at 00:29, Tim Starling wrote:
Is there anyone out there who has considered
contributing to the
MediaWiki PHP script, but decided it against for reasons such as:
* Don't know PHP/MySQL
* Poor documentation, can't understand the code
* Wouldn't know where to start
* Don't have a test server
* Don't have CVS/server access, and you find contributing otherwise to
be tedious and frustrating
Or perhaps you've contributed on occasion but you're deterred from
contributing again for reasons such as those above?
I know PHP, MySQL, CVS, HTML et cetera all to a reasonable standard, and
thought you would all be gagging for me.
I tried to start developing, but found myself largely ignored. I asked
for suggestions as to where to start, what were the areas that needed
work, but was just vaguely pointed towards the bug reports.
If someone had said you can do X - something attainable within a few
hours - I would have probably been hooked.
I made one commit to CVS, but it still hasn't gone onto the English
Wikipedia (it was only one line).
That's why I gave up trying. Anyway, that was the summer holidays. Now I
at Uni with much less free time.
My pointers:
- Be very enthusiastic when someone comes forward
- Give them something to get hooked on
- Access to a test server
If so, please speak up! What areas could we improve to
make it easier to
contribute?
If you prefer, you can contact me privately at tstarlingphysicsunimelbeduau.
-- Tim Starling.
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