Further Information for Student Contestants

Task Categories

Tasks have been sorted into the following categories. You can find all tasks in a particular category by searching for a particular label:

• Code: writing or refactoring code
• QualityAssurance: testing and ensuring code is of high quality
• Translation
• UserInterface: user experience research or user interface design and interaction
• Documenation: creating/editing documents
• Outreach: community management and outreach/marketing
• Training: helping others learn more
• Research: studying a problem and recommending solutions

All tasks have an initial time limit of one week.

• If you need more time, then be sure to show that you've been working on the task throughout the week, so its not to make up for you starting late. If you've shown great progress then we'll generally give you a couple more days. Note that you can only work on one task at a time, so if you take a long time to do a task, you'll do less tasks, which will reduce the amount of money you'll get :)
• If you have shown no progress during that first week, we'll give you a warning that we want to see your work. If you don't within a day or so, then we'll give the entire task to someone else to do.

Getting Help

These pages will be the most useful for you as a newly arrived contributor:

• SilverStripe GHOP Mailing List
• If you sign up to a task you MUST sign up to this so that the SilverStripe project can easily communicate to you.
• Use the list to have difficult questions answered.
• SilverStripe Forum: General questions about installing and developing for silverstripe. There's a lot more people here than in the GHOP list so ask general questions here first.
• User Guide - Non technical; how to use the CMS
• Developer Documentation
• Getting started: Tutorials

We really want to encourage you to use the same channels as all of our community participants, which is mainly through the forums on the silverstripe.com site. These forums have lots of people who are willing to answer questions, critique your work or generally be helpful.

Getting More Help

If you have signed up to complete a particular task and you have some questions about how best to complete it, first see if the task description has specific instructions about whom to contact for assistance. If there are no specific instructions in the task, these resources should be helpful to you:

By Chat

Representatives from the Silverstripe project will be hanging out on the #silverstripe IRC Channel to answer any questions you may have. If they don't know the answer, they will be happy to point you in the right direction.

In particular, feel free to join our weekly core developer IRC chat, which will let you talk to the most knowledgeable folk at SilverStripe.

By Email

Please contact your mentor directly through the address listed in your task.

If you have asked your question on the mailing list but find you need a more granular answer, one of the program administrators will introduce you to the right person.

Licensing and Attribution

The GHOP contest requires any code and other contributions you provide to be given under an open source license, to ensure your work is available for use by anyone in the world.

The SilverStripe project is released under the very liberal open source BSD license. Therefore you agree that the code, ideas and all other aspects of your contributions in your entry are released under the BSD license, so that they may be included in the SilverStripe project.

• More info: Contest Official Rules, Description of the BSD license

We are very pleased to have your help and as a courtesy are happy to attribute your work in various places, such as where you download translations and themes, and in our blog. We will assume you want your name mentioned unless you suggest an alias, or the desire to remain anonymous.

Other Questions

If you have a question not answered here that is related to contest mechanics, your best bet is to check out Google's contest homepage (http://code.google.com/opensource/ghop/2007-8) for more details.