Projects
The Kiwix volunteer program offers talented, motivated people ways contribute to Kiwix in minor ways. Contributors speak English, French, or German. Technical volunteers should know JavaScript, CSS, other web languages, or C++.
Tasks
(re)-Introduce ZIM support in MediaWiki Book creator/OCG
MediaWiki is the wiki engine behind Wikipedia, all Wikimedia projects and thousands of other Web sites. It's a cutting edge free software providing highly featured web sites that anybody can edit. MediaWiki hosts content that can be made available for offline usage through the Collection extension (written in PHP). The Collection extension allows easy creation of collections of articles, called books; here is how it works on the English Wikipedia. Once created, books can be exported into PDF format. The PDF exporting backend itself is not provided by the Collection extension. It is done with a JavaScript based solution called OCG. OCG is a NodeJS daemon able to transform a book definition in a PDF and it should be able to do the same in the ZIM format. The ZIM format allows the storage of webpages (with images, videos, etc...) in one extremely compressed file. These pages are then available to read on most computers with Kiwix. A stub of solution has already been written and the MWOffline is already functional. This task is mostly about merging them.
phpzim (assigned)
Promotional video (assigned)
Look here for more details.
Testing platform
We need a solution to automatically test Kiwix. We currently have nothing... so we will start from scratch!
Wikipublish
Create a publication platform like a online Web site similar to iTunes which would provide a list of available content to download in ZIM or EPUB formats. It would also show previews of content before downloading.
- Want to know more...
- Add support of EPUB in Kiwix
OSM
Make a proof of concept of a ZIM file providing a map using OSM data and a tool like openLayer.
Improve P2P support
- Fix Mirrorbrain to integrate torrent links in mirrorbrain
- Fix Mirrorbrain to support fallback torrent trackers in .torrent files
- Add a way to exchange library and content on a local network (for example, using "bonjour" & BitTorrent DHT)
Linux Packaging project (assigned)
Ambassador Program
Create an ambassador program. Ambassadors would be expert users of Kiwix and would be able to help others by:
- Spreading content
- Organizing conferences
- Running advertisement
- Acting as a local representative
To do that, we should develop a set of tools:
- Advertisement Package
- Ambassador program goals
- Map base on Ushahidi to locate them
Starter Kit (Assigned)
Perhaps a nice kit would help. You know, like for organizing Linux installation parties[1] or Mozilla's event kits[2] etc., that encourages people, and provides step-by-step guidance and advice, to go and install Kiwix with a relevant offline Wikipedia file in their local no-Internet (or restricted/expensive Internet) school, college, community center, etc.
Would anyone be interested in working on that? WMF can contribute funding for some materials -- a Kiwix quick-start guide or cheatsheet, stickers, T-shirts. [1] http://ladypine.org/installfest.html, http://www.wikihow.com/Arrange-Linux-Install-Party [2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Webmaker/Teach/WebmakingResources
Video
It would be great to have a video (screencast) presenting the software with its most important features.
Here is a proposition:
- Presentation slide of the video with slide and authors
- Presentation of the context (Online Wikipedia put offline of a DVD)
- Presentation of the principle of Kiwix and ZIM
- Starting Kiwix
- Open file
- Indexing file
- surfing
- searching
- special features: fullscreen, switch language, changing font size, going to a random page, etc.
- Finish (present the available ZIM files and how to download them)