Introduction

These "Help" documents have been composed to answer questions you might have related to this site. Whether you are a guest or a registered user, you can peruse information like this help document about how to use and participate in this site. The table of contents delineates the various topics that these help documents address. If you have immediate questions, general or specific, you might also find the Site FAQ useful.

You can also find out more about the development projects hosted on this site by viewing the complete listing and visiting individual project home page. If you want to get more involved, you must be a registered user. Registering with this site opens up a further range of possibilities available to you here ...

• from simply joining a project as an observer
• to actively contributing to a project
• to proposing and leading your own project.

In general, this site aims to provide developers with the tools and resources needed in creating and maintaining projects. Once created, a project is worked on by registered users who join as members to form a kind of community associated with the project. Project owners must craft projects that not only will be approved by the site administrators, but will also be appealing enough to attract users who register with this site to become active participants.

This same dynamic that governs individual project administration implicitly determines how this site functions. These help documents are meant to help project owners craft and maintain appealing and successful projects and to aid users in working within the community associated with any project.

Before you register: what guest users can do

If you are viewing this site but not logged in, you are considered a guest user. You are most welcome to investigate the site and view project information. The projects you can view are public; there are also other private projects hosted on this site. As a guest user, you can:

• View category and project home pages.
• Read project news and documents pages.
• Browse and check out source code for public projects.
• Read the Site FAQ and Terms of Use documents.

Should you wish to register to gain further access to site resources, join a project, or perhaps even start your own project, you can use the Register link on the Community page at any time to create a user account. You will also find links to the registration screen on various project pages.

Registering with the site

To register with the site, click on the Register. You will need to fill in the registration form, providing your personal information. Several of the fields are required and registration cannot be complete without entering information in these fields.

User name is used to identify registered users. Your user name is used to create an email alias, identify you as a member of the site and as your issue tracking name. Your username must be 1 - 16 characters in length, can contain any alphanumeric characters (a-z, A-Z and 0-9) and underlines. The user name cannot contain any spaces.

Example: the following are valid user names: jandoe, jan_doe, j4nd0e, JANDOE, JanDoe.

Email addresses are used to route messages from mail lists, issue tracking systems and any message sent to your email alias. Your email address can contain any alphanumeric character (a-z, A-Z and 0-9), the @ character and underlines.

Example: the following are valid email addresses: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected].

Real name is used in emails. Your real name can be any length and contain any combination of alphanumeric character (a-z, A-Z and 0-9) as well as any of the following characters: _-.,(" )' and the space character.

Example: The following are valid real names: Jan Doe, J4n D0e, Jan_doe, Jan(d)oe

Organization is an optional field. Filling in this field identifies you to the administrator as a part of a particular group or affiliation. The organization field can be up to 99 characters in length and can be any character

Example: the following are valid organization name: JaneDoe.com, Thi+i=M,0rga!izati%on

Before you join a project: what registered users can do

If you are a registered user, the natural place to start (and it is also the default) is your Start Page, which presents you with a navigation bar on the left listing useful and important links. Each of these items is available for browsing. In fact, before you have even joined a project, you can:

• View category and project home pages.
• Read project news pages.
• Read the Site FAQ and Terms of Use documents.
• Edit your user login ID, password, and other account information.
• Download pertinent tools and software development kits (SDKs).
• Download sample source code.
• Join project mailing lists.
• Propose your own project.
• Add a project to your start page for tracking purposes

These items are touched on throughout the Help pages, as they are common to all users alike. Each item provides some insight either into the structure of this site into particular projects and their communities of developers. Investigating project categories, for instance, can give you a fair idea of the project at hand, as can reading the project news pages.