First off, thank you for your interest to contribute to our project! Without people like you, we wouldn't have reached what we have today.
Secondly, have a look at our Code of Conduct to keep our community a welcoming and safe space for everyone.
Before immediately jumping in the deep, take a moment to look at existing issues and pull requests to check if your bug, feature or idea has already been suggested or reported.
Issues can be used for a variety of things: reporting bugs, requesting new features and much more. Issues are a way to track and prioritize progress for the developers and everyone involved.
We provide some issue templates you can use so it is easier to provide enough information so that others better understand your idea, feature or when a specific bug occurred. Head over to the "Issues" section of the repository to open a new issue.
When you want to add, fix, improve, or simply said change something yourself and you know how to use Git, you can make the modifications yourself and then open a pull request. The pull request will be reviewed by the developers and merged when it is good enough. You can always open an issue first asking if your changes would have any chance of getting merged so you don't put any unnecessary work into something that has no potential.
To start working on changes yourself, first fork the repository to your own GitHub account and then clone the fork to your own computer. Now you can start making changes. If you get involved into any source code, make sure to test your changes before committing. The instructions for compiling can be found in the INSTALL file. After committing the changes in Git, you can push the commits to your forked repository and open the pull request on GitHub. Read the GitHub docs at https://docs.github.com for more information about using Git, issues and pull requests. In any case, read the project documentation for technical information and coding conventions.
Before opening the pull request, make sure to test your changes by compiling and running the software and make sure everything works as intended.
Haven't found what you're looking for? Check out the documentation or wiki that contains more technical details and further information about configuring and using the software. Still struggling? Maybe something is just not well documented. You can open a new issue and describe your issue and what and how it should be improved.
Congratulations! You're now one of the valuable contributors, whether you improve the source code, add features, fix documentation or only report bugs, it is all very much appreciated because it keeps the project going forward.