Top 10 ways to get involved in Plone - Darci Hanning¶

She's involved in plinkit that provided pre-build websites for small libraries. Currently, she's mostly integrating and customizing, not programming anymore. Here are 10 tips for non-developers to get involved in plone.

10: blog about plone. How you use it; what you like; comparison to other systems that you know. Promote plone improvements: talk about improvements that you want and you might get others to chime in. Read Jon Stahl's blog as an example ([Reinout:] or mine :-)). And get listed on http://planet.plone.org .

9: contribute a theme.

8: "Adopt" a product. Assist the developer by reporting bugs or by verifying already reported bugs. Offer to write documentation! A step further: become the product owner. There are orphaned products that nobody updates the product page for. No new releases are being made. A great way to get involved.

7: Marketing. Put your site on http://plone.net . For bonus points, write it up as a case study. Or tag sites on del.icio.us with plone-site .

6: Online participation. Mailinglists, irc.

5: Local user groups. Either join one or start one. Do take care of announcing them widely, as that's often forgotten.

4: Sprints. They're not just for developers! There's been a documentation sprint, for instance. If you're not a develooper: sponsoring is really valuable.

3: Beta/release candidate releases. Download them and play with it. Especially new plone releases. Report bugs and test by migrating sites. A good way to contribute is to determine documentation needs.

2: Documentation. Use it, comment on it. And write it!

1: Report bugs. Valuable feedback to the developers. Also if you're not sure: report it anyway.

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