If you're interested in working on the Geeklog code, there's an introductory article on our wiki: http://wiki.geeklog.net/index.php/Getting_Started

For non-programming tasks that we would welcome help with, please see the "Other than writing code, how can I contribute?" list below.

The Geeklog FAQ, http://www.geeklog.net/faqman/, is hard to maintain in its current state (due to technical issues with the FAQ plugin and the fact that contributions can't be included easily). So the idea is to move all the current FAQ topics to the Geeklog Wiki, http://wiki.geeklog.net/

Hints: One wiki page per FAQ article. Add a FAQ category. Make sure the formatting, e.g. of sample code, is carried over.

Geeklog provides simplified "printable" views for articles and static pages. These use a stripped-down print.css stylesheet that needs some work to make the printout look nicer, e.g. fonts, spacing, margins.

Also: Is there a good way to make links appear in the printout (e.g. for a link saying "click here", make the URL it links to show up in the printout)? Maybe have a look at the print stylesheet from Wikipedia for some inspiration.

project.geeklog.net is the server that hosts our development resources: bugtracker, Mercurial repository, and a few other tools. The homepage (just one HTML page with links to the various tools) is pretty sparse right now. It could use a few more texts explaining what you can find there and a nicer design.

Try to install Geeklog following the installation instructions: http://www.geeklog.net/docs/english/install.html

Make notes of the problems you have understanding these instructions. Suggest a list of improvements.

Documentation is always an issue in an open source project. We are looking for someone who would be interested in helping with bringing some structure into the chaos that is the Geeklog wiki, http://wiki.geeklog.net/ There's a lot of content in there, but it's sometimes hard to find. Also, because the good content is hard to find, it's not entirely clear what is missing. Please contact us if this is something you are interested in.

Try to install Geeklog following the installation instructions: http://www.geeklog.net/docs/english/install.thml

Make notes of the problems you run into following these instructions. Check that the troubleshooting section covers these problems. If not, suggest additions.

When you click to download OpenOffice.org, you are taken to a page that explains how you can contribute to OOo:

http://download.openoffice.org/contribute.html

We would like to see someone design a similar page for Geeklog, i.e. provide reasons and links to opportunities to help (especially non-coding) and wrap that in a friendly design.

We have quite a few patches for issues (bugs and feature requests) in our bugtracker, http://project.geeklog.net/tracking/

You could help us by reviewing such a patch, i.e. check that it can be applied to the current Geeklog version; fix it if it can't be applied as-is; check that it does resolve the issue; leave feedback and, if necessary, an updated patch on the issue in the bugtracker.

No coding required - it would already help us to know that the patch can be applied and whether or not it solves the issue.

The corresponding bugtracker entries are in the category "Patches" (please ignore issues that have status "resolved"):

http://project.geeklog.net/tracking/search.php?project_id=5&category=Patches&sticky_issues=off&sortby=id&dir=DESC&hide_status_id=80

If it turns out that the patch doesn't solve the issue then we wouldn't stop you from providing a correct fix, of course ;-)

Geeklog ships with 10 very simple help files in the directory public_html/help. Effectively, these files only list the required fields for certain forms (story submission, search, and so on).

To do: Check that the list of required fields is still correct and rewrite the help pages to be more friendly and informative. Design suggestions are also welcome.

The file docs/english/config.html describes all the Configuration options. As of Geeklog 1.8.0, these texts are also displayed as tooltips on the Configuration Admin panel.

The problem here is that the descriptions mostly date back from the days when Geeklog was configured through a text file (config.php). Therefore, the description often refers to the $_CONF array which, while still used internally, is now mostly hidden from the user. As an example, many options use numeric values internally ("1" means this, "2" means that, etc.), but are now presented as dropdown menus to the user, so that the numeric values don't really mean anything anymore to the average user.

So we are looking for someone to review the descriptions and rewrite them to better match the Configuration user interface.

Spambots, hackers, script kiddies, etc. are a huge problem for any website. Geeklog already ships with the Spam-X spam filter plugin and there's a port of Bad Behavior (originally developed for Wordpress), but it's alway good to have more alternatives.

http://www.spambotsecurity.com/zbblock.php looks like a promising project. We would like to see this rolled into a plugin for Geeklog.

Strictly speaking, this *is* a coding task, but it mostly involves putting existing pieces together ...

When you install Geeklog for the first time, you end up on a pretty sparse page that tells you the account name and password that you can use to log in and gives some security advice.

Thoughts:
1) This page could be a bit more enthusiastic and friendly.
2) Why is there even a separate page? A fresh install also has a "welcome" story on the homepage. This would also give a better impression of what the site looks like (instead of dumping the new site owner on a page that s/he'll never come back to).
3) The success page is part of the install script. Which means that it will be removed when the user deletes the install script, as per the security advice. This can be good or bad: Good since it would be possible to make a more "fancy" page without all this extra code lying around later. Bad since the user will never their way back again to this site, e.g. to look something up.
4) We still need a success message after a site upgrade. This one could be shorter and terser, though, since we can assume that the user is familiar with Geeklog at that point.

Suggested action: Do a fresh install of Geeklog. Try to imagine you're a new user and end up on the success page. What would you think? What would you expect? What's missing? What could be better / nicer?

This is more of a research task: Hiphop is a PHP-to-C++ compiler, developed by Facebook. Facebook is written in PHP but the actual Facebook site runs the C++ code produced by hiphop. There is probably only one Geeklog site that would benefit from this translation (Groklaw), but we'd like to know if you can actually compile Geeklog with hiphop and which, if any, problems exist with it.

So the idea is to grab the current Geeklog release, try to compile it with hiphop, and use the result to run a website.

Please make notes of any issues you run into and document them on the Geeklog wiki, so that we can address them and reproduce the experiment.

We've labelled those tasks of which we think that they are relatively easy to tackle with a "beginner" label in our bugtracker. Follow this link to see them all: http://project.geeklog.net/tracking/search.php?hide_status_id=90&tag_string=beginner

This is a perfectly valid request but somehow nobody wants to tackle it ...

Currently, Geeklog can send certain notification emails (e.g. new user registered, new story was submitted, etc.) to the site email address, as specified in the Configuration. However, it would make more sense to be able to send these notification emails to groups of users, e.g. new registration emails to user admins, story submission to story admins, etc.

There are now 3 related issues in our bugtracker which all address different aspects of the same basic issue:

http://project.geeklog.net/tracking/view.php?id=192
http://project.geeklog.net/tracking/view.php?id=697
http://project.geeklog.net/tracking/view.php?id=773

It's pretty clear how to implement this feature. It does however require some changes in the Configuration. Maybe that's why nobody wants to have a go at it ...