Contributing to GnuCash

The GnuCash Project is a volunteer-driven organization, meaning it depends on volunteers such as you to survive and grow. This page explains different ways to contribute to the project.

Many ideas here are taken from this slashdot comment.

Financial Support

The GnuCash Project encourages financial contributions at its donations page.

Testing

Programmers can be fine testers, but non-programmers seem to be able to break programs in new and mysterious ways. The trick here is to learn how to give the best information to the programmers about how to reproduce bugs. A programmer will usually only be able to fix a bug they can see; if you can't make the programmer see your bug, it won't get fixed! If you find a real reproducible bug, check with Bugzilla to make sure the developers know about it. Programmers should feel free to add plenty of unit tests (see Testing) as well.

Feedback

Providing feedback on what features are used, and what aren't is important to developers who may spend a lot of time on a feature they think is important instead of a feature that actually is important. GnuCash offers numerous ways to provide feedback: the Mailing Lists, Bugzilla, and Enhancement Requests.

Advocacy

You usually get developers because they use software and have an itch to scratch. Running tutorials, presentations at local LUGs can be invaluable for getting a larger user base, and therefore hopefully a larger developer base.

Documentation

Users can help with writing and editing the main help documents, the Concept Guide, (or why to do things, accounting is a black art to many). Help people out using the program. The article said that the programmers are spending a lot of their time answering questions instead of actually getting on and doing the job. Even simple things like "Tips and tricks" are a good start. If users can help other users, then the current programmers can spend more of their time getting new developers up to speed.

Wiki

Write answers to FAQ's. Wiki'ing is very addictive and fun. And while you're at it, everyone learns! As you probably have noticed, you are looking at such a wiki right now.

Getting started on the GnuCash Wiki

You'll need an account. Unfortunately we've been beset by robot accounts and spammers over the last few years and now require contributors to request an account. This is human-moderated and you must convince the human that you're not a spammer or a robot. Don't bother requesting an account until you see something you want to change. Fill out the request form and explain in the "Reason" box exactly what you want to change and why. General descriptions of your skills aren't useful and will be ignored. If you've been contributing on the mailing list mention that with your email address (the request form isn't public, only wiki admins can see what you enter).

When your account is approved, you will receive an email with a temporary password. You should be able to log into the Wiki and change your password. At first you have just minimal user rights, allowing you enhanced reading ability, namely that you can add pages to a personal watchlist. To be able to edit any pages, you need emailconfirmed status. To get that, click on "Preferences", see your "User profile", and select the option to confirm your email, which sends an email to your personal email account. In your personal email software, find that email and click on the link it provides. You may or may not need to log out and log back in again. Under Preferences, you should see your membership in emailconfirmed group.

With emailconfirmed status, you still can't edit the GnuCash main page, because it is protected for editing only by administrators (you will just see "View source" as a tab, but not "Edit"). At many other pages, you can now edit, although you cannot create new pages.

As of 2017, an emailconfirmed account will automatically further acquire autoconfirmed status after 7 days. With that, you should be able to create new pages.

For most browsers Wikipedia editing extensions exist to make the job easier. To get one, search the addons page of your browser provider.

For Wikipedia editors

Wiki users who have edited in Wikipedia will find that the editing environment is similar. It uses the same mediawiki software. With autoconfirmed status you may create your own user page and user Talk page.

Translation

If your natural language is different from English, you can contribute by translating

• parts of this wiki,
• the website,
• the messages of the program,
• the official documentation "Help" and "Tutorial and Concepts Guide", or
• New Account Templates for your region

See Translation for details.

You could also support the Mailing Lists team of your language.

Code

If you're a programmer, obviously a good way to help is to start writing useful code :). Please see Development for how to get started and Development Process for our procedures and guidelines.