<b>Get started</b>

pratyk (and anyone else who wants to start participating): the best place to start is https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_become_a_MediaWiki_hacker , our "how to start working on MediaWiki" page. It's a resource hub and tutorial.

If you are ready to start fixing bugs and writing new features, the Annoying Little Bugs page https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Annoying_Little_Bug is a good place to start.

I'm a Web Developer who has worked with PHP before on Drupal, writing custom modules, modifying existing ones to add / subtract features and so on. I do know a fair bit of JavaScript + HTML/CSS and I feel I'm good at reading code and figuring out how things work, and then modify things or reuse things to suit my needs. I feel I need to be more active in development again and possibly contribute to an existing project in general.

Go to https://translatewiki.net/Special:FirstSteps and follow instructions. Glad to have you!

Check out http://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/09/16/mediawiki118iscomin/ . We're deploying a new version of MediaWiki to some test sites this week and next, so if you want to help by doing some testing, now's a good time to do it. You don't need to install anything special. You can just bang on the http://test2.wikipedia.org/ wiki starting now, and other wikis later this week, per the schedule in the blog post.

If you have any spare time, we could really use some testing, especially on Internet Explorer, and throwing any gender & HTTPS edge cases you can think of into the mix. More ideas in the release notes:

http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/branches/REL1_18/phase3/RELEASE-NOTES-1.18

A refresher on how to file a bug: go to bugzilla.wikimedia.org, create an account, and click the Enter a New Bug link in the lefthand column. Choose MediaWiki, then General/Unknown as the component, and 1.18 as the version.

Sometime ago I added a list of bugs tagged "easy" in mediawiki's bugzila to the Getting Started page of mediawiki.org. The list can be found here: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=advanced&keywords=easy&bug_severity=normal&bug_severity=minor&bug_severity=trivial&bug_severity=enhancement&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED&product=MediaWiki&product=MediaWiki%20extensions

What: internationalisation triage bug triage
When: Wednesday, September 14, 13:00UTC
Time zone conversion: http://hexm.de/73
Where: #wikimedia-dev on freenode
Use http://webchat.freenode.net/ if you don't have an IRC
client

I would specifically call for any newbie developers to come to this triage because we have selected a bunch of relatively easy issues you may be able to help with to familiarize yourself with the MediaWiki localistion code and submit a patch for.

Full information is at http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2011-September/055149.html

We're having a bug triage meeting on IRC, on FreeNode in #wikimedia-dev , in about four hours (21:00 UTC). We'll be discussing whether certain bugs of ours are "easy" and good places for new developers to start. You can prep by looking at these notes:

http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/BugTriage-2011-07

Thanks! Hope to see you there! (Sorry for the late notice -- I ran into a glitch while posting this yesterday.)

We'd like for people to be able to include music markup in MediaWiki pages, for sheet music. See https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Music_markup for more details. If you're a musician or music enthusiast, this is a great project to tackle.