Ways to Contribute to PortaBase

There are several tasks that can be done to improve either PortaBase itself or its usefulness to people; some of these don't require any particular technical knowledge, others require only web development or server administration skills, others are actual programming tasks. If you'd like to contribute by taking on one of these, or if you think of something I don't have listed here, please let me know. The ones I've thought of so far are:

  • Translations - Currently PortaBase is only available in Czech, English, French, German, Japanese, Spanish, and traditional Chinese (and the web site is still only in English). Most of these translations need to be updated, and I'm unsure if the people who did these translations 6 years ago want to continue working on them. If you'd like to translate the user interface, the help file, or any of the web site resources into another language, check out the translation page.
  • Bug reports - If you encounter a problem with PortaBase, please let me know about it so I can fix it. Even if it's something minor that you can live with, it's probably causing some degree of aggravation to dozens of people, and I may not have noticed it yet.
  • Feature requests - If you think of features that would be nice to have in PortaBase and aren't yet included in the todo list, please mention it.
  • File repository - A web site offering submission and downloads of PortaBase data files would be useful; such repositories are available for PalmOS database programs such as MobileDB and JFile. These files tend to be things like holiday lists, unit conversions, US state data, periodic table info, etc.
  • File templates - Create template files for common file types such as shopping lists, expense tracking, media inventories, etc. These could have pre-defined columns, views, filters, and sortings. These would ideally be kept in the already-mentioned file repository, but could be kept on the main web site instead.
  • Binary packages - I create PortaBase binaries for Maemo, Mac OS X, Windows, and Debian unstable (one or two popular architectures) for each new release. If you're willing to create installation packages for other distributions or operating systems, please let me know.
  • File format conversions - Conversions to and from other database and spreadsheet formats can be done by converting to or from the PortaBase XML format; this can be done by a separate program without making any changes to PortaBase itself. If you write such a conversion tool for a popular format (using Python, Java, XSLT, or whatever), please let me know so I can mention or provide it on the web site.
  • PortaBase XML file tools - There are many other ways of using the PortaBase XML import and export capabilities, like converting to HTML via XSLT files. If you come up with something particularly useful, let me know and I could post it on (or link to it from) the web site.
  • Code patches - If there's a PortaBase feature that you'd like to see done before I'm likely to get to it and you're comfortable with C++ programming, feel free to send me patches to the code. You may want to ask me about it first to make sure I haven't already put some thought into how I'd like to see it done.