TDF Community Blog

LibreOffice is made by hundreds of people around the world. And throughout May, we want to say a big thank you to everyone involved! Now is a great time to get involved with our friendly community and help out in many areas, from translations and documentation through to user support and marketing.

Over the next four weeks, we’ll be keeping track of contributions to the project, and add your name to this wiki page if you help out. The page will be updated daily, and everyone listed there can claim a sticker, as shown in the video above! Here’s how you can get involved…

How to get a sticker

There are many ways you can help the LibreOffice project and claim a sticker:

• Help to confirm bugs: go to our Bugzilla page and look for new bugs. If you can recreate one, add a comment like “CONFIRMED on Windows 10 and LibreOffice 5.4.2”. (Make sure you’re using the latest version of LibreOffice.)

• Contribute code: The codebase is big, but there are lots of places to get involved with small jobs. See our Developers page on the website and this page on the wiki to get started. Once you’ve submitted a patch, if it gets merged we’ll send you a sticker!

• Translate the interface: LibreOffice is available in a wide range of languages, but its interface translations need to be kept up-to-date. Or maybe you want to translate the suite to a whole new language? Get involved here.

• Write documentation: Another way to earn a badge is to help the LibreOffice documentation team. Whether you want to update the online help or add chapters to the handbooks, here’s where to start.

• Answer questions from users: Over on Ask LibreOffice there are many users looking for help with the suite. We’re keeping an eye on that site so if you give someone useful advice, you can claim a shiny sticker.

• Spread the word: Tell everyone about LibreOffice on Twitter! Just say why you love it or what you’re using it for, add the #libreoffice hashtag, and at the end of the month you can claim a sticker. (We have a maximum of 100 stickers for this category, in case the whole internet starts tweeting!)

So there’s plenty to do! Dive in, get involved and help make LibreOffice better for millions of people around the world – and enjoy your sticker as thanks from us. We’ll be posting regular updates on this blog and our Twitter account over the next four weeks!

Lots of things are happening in the LibreOffice community – in development, documentation, design, QA, translations and much more. Here’s a summary of news and updates in April…

• LibreOffice 6.0.3 was released on April 3. It includes over 70 bug and regression fixes – see the release announcement for more details.

• From April 6 – 8, we had a LibreOffice community meeting and Hackfest in Hamburg. There were around 45 participants, who split into two groups. One group focused on a hackfest – a joint coding session. At the same time, a meeting of the German-speaking LibreOffice community took place. See here for the results of the hackfest, and what we discussed.

• We talked to Edmund Laugasson from the Estonian LibreOffice community about his efforts to promote free and open source software in his country. “ODF is quite widely used in Estonia – for instance, educational institutions usually have LibreOffice installed, along with some local authorities.” – Full interview here.

• Preparation began for the Month of LibreOffice, May 2018 – crediting contributions all across the project. If you’re a proud user of LibreOffice and would like to join our community, get involved! (We’ll even send you a cool sticker pack.)

• The next LibreOffice Conference will take place from September 26 – 28 in Tirana, Albania, and TDF put out a call for papers. All members and contributors are invited to submit talks, lectures and workshops for the conference – see here for more info.

• The first Bug Hunting Session for LibreOffice 6.1 took place on April 27. LibreOffice users could try out an alpha release of the software, and then find and report bugs. Mentors were available on the #libreoffice-qa IRC channel, and there was a particular focus on improvements to image handling and the HSQLDB import filter for firebird.

• Finally, we gave a warm welcome to our new Google Summer of Code 2018 students. We have a record off 11 students this year, and they will help to improve LibreOffice in many areas: the LOEclipse Plugin, Notebookbar, LibreOffice Viewer for Android and more. So a big hello to Daniel Silva, Ekansh Jha, Hrishabh Rajput, Kshitij Pathania, Manuj Vashist, Muammer Mert Tümer, Nickson Thanda, Raghav Lalvani, Saurav Chirania, Shobhan Mandal and Vikas Mahato!

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