Projects

The Kiwix volunteers program offers motivated and talented people ways to work for Kiwix during a limited time. Contributors can speak English, French, or German. Technical volunteers should know JavaScript, CSS, or other web languages, or C++.

Tasks

Kiwix for Android (Assigned)

Always more people use smartphones as medium for their digital life. This is especially the case in emerging countries which are targeted by Kiwix. We think Android will be the most important mobile platform in the next years, especially for the cheapest devices. Android is in addition, to the opposite of the Apple app. store, open to free softwares. Consequently our next big step, is to port Kiwix to Android.

We do not want to start an other software which would generate a lot of additional code to develop and maintain. So, current Kiwix code base has to be reused and ported. Kiwix runs currently with the help of Xulrunner, but it can also runs perfectly using Firefox. Firefox can since version 3 is able to launch third party software, like Kiwix. Fennec, Firefox for mobiles, was launched a few month ago for Android, so we hope that Kiwix could be ported to Android using Fennec or something similar (see this example).

We need for this task someone with good knowledges in C++, compilation and with know-how in porting C++ softwares to Android. Someone with enough motivation to build a prototype of XUL (with custom C++ XPCOM components) application running on Android could also match the requirements.

Collect informations about our audience (Assigned)

As Kiwix grows more in popularity it would be really nice to tell the stories of the organizations that are using it. If we know who's using it then we can ask those people to let us know how we can make it better. It would also allow us to better understand the reach that our offline projects and how fast we are improving us.

Currently with think in the following directions:

• Get more informations about the downloads and develop KPIs
• Setup a system to allow user to give us a feedback (see Tomasz's email)
• Improve/simplify bug reporting and feature requesting (being able to leave an email adress without registering, simplier).
• Feedback system

New Web site

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We need to replace the current web site by a more simple and fancy one. The current one is too complicated for the average customer and mix informations for devs and end users. In addition it does not provide some features which are essentials like a simple an intuitive way to search over the ZIM library or a simple way to give a feedback (bug report or feature request). So there is a lot of improvement potential in both content and visuals.

This new one should be based on Mediawiki and we already have a design. The wiki part, like we know it, would be still accessible but not push on the front of the Web site. So we need someone we good PHP & Web languages knowledges to do that.

See also http://paulgu.com/wiki/Drop_Down_Menu_Series

Compilation Platform (Assigned)

Kiwix is currently ported to 3 different platforms: MS Windows, Apple Mac OS X and GNU/Linux. In addition, and this has to be kept in mind, there are many GNU/Linux distributions and also two architectures per platform. So we speak here of 10->20 files we have to prepare each time we release a new version of Kiwix.

We currently do that manually, and because we do not have a lot of packagers, most of the work is done by developers... by hand. We support always more platforms, so this takes always more time and consequently brakes the whole release management. In addition, doing that manually is a big source of errors.

So we are searching for someone to build a global software solution to fix that issue. This solution should allow someone to build all these files with only a few clicks or commands. This solution should be fully documented and as cheap as possible. We think this should use virtual machines to avoid the need of a lot of expensive hardware. Our first researches were leading to Mozilla Tinderbox which seems to be the best alternative (but if you have a better idea, we are ready to discuss it):

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Tinderbox
• https://wiki.mozilla.org/Tinderbox:Tbox3_Setup
• http://www.johnkeiser.com/mozilla/tbox3.html

But, maybe BuildBot or Jenkins could also do the job!

We seek here someone with good knowledge in compilation and scripting languages like Perl and/or bash to setup and document this platform.

Follow the implementation on these pages:

• Black&White Project/Compilation Farm
• Black&White Project/Automatic compilation

Mediawiki DumpHTML extension improvement

• Mediawiki DumpHTML extension improvement

Kiwix plug (Assigned)

See Plug solution.

See also

• WMF Offline project overview
• Roadmap/en