OpenCards is open-source software and everybody who want to contribute something to it is cordially welcome. There are different ways to contribute to our project, and the most of them don't rely on strange computer-programming skills but just on a few minutes of your time.

Share your knowledge !

Probably the easiest way to contribute is to share your card-files with the OpenCards-community. To organize the process of sharing a little we've installed a flashcards repository which is intended to become a starting point when looking for new cool flashcard-sets.

Translate it into your language !

OpenCards selects its user interface language according to the interface language of OpenOffice. If the latter is not available for OpenCards it falls back to use English.

So far OpenCards was localized to the following languages: English (non-native only, so feel free to send us corrections), German, French, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Portuguese, Bulgarian.

Wanted: We need you to translate OpenCards into your language! Especially we would welcome localizations to Chinese(Mandarin), Japanese, Arabic and Korean. 

Localizing OpenCards to your language is really simple and requires approximately 2 hours of time.

1. Check that nobody has already created a translation since the last OpenCards release. To do so, just check that there is no file called translation_<your language code>.properties in this directory
2. Download the file translation.properties
3. Replace the text after the '=' in each line with an appropriate translation
4. Email the modified file to us (including the name of the language please)

If you find an already existing translation to be not complete or incorrect, please don't hesitate to send us your ideas for improvements (if possible by just patching the according translation-file and sending the modified version to us).

If you have any questions concerning the above mentioned procedure please contact us. You're welcome, really!

Spread the word !

The more people know about OpenCards, the more people will use it, the more people will contribute card-sets, ideas, bug-fixes and translations. So if you're blogging about an related area, just drop a note about OpenCards to your readers.

Vote for it !

Being an extension for OpenOffice, OpenCards profits from all of the cool features OpenOffice comes along with. But as for any piece of software there are some bugs in OpenOffice and some features are still missing. In order to determine the most demanded tasks/bugs to be fixed, the OpenOffice developers use a voting system. So if you would like to see an even better OpenCards in the future please consider to vote for the following two issues:

• issue 83596 which describes the problem that all OpenCards-windows are not linked to the OpenOffice-window (and stay on top of other applications also if OpenOffice is minimized). We consider the effect of problem to be the most serious usability problem of OpenCards

• issue 84611 which describes the problem that the slides of a presentation can not become reordered by an extension (like OpenCards). This problem is the reason for the limited flashcard-printing abilities of OpenCards, which are restricted to one slide per page.

Become an OpenCards-developer !

If you know how to write Java code, you might want to pick up on of our tracker issues and fix it right now . If you prefer to do something else, just do it or discuss it with us. One aspect which is currently out of our scope (due to personal interest and limited time) are import-filters for other flashcard-formats (jMemorize , Mnemosyne , Pauker, etc. ) . So we would really appreciate any help in this direction.

If you're using Ubuntu make sure that you've installed the package openoffice.org-officebean. This is mandatory if you would like to run the different test application contained in our OpenCards source tree.

Donate !!

The major goal of the OpenCards project is to deliver state-of-art free open-source software. But although we would be happy to be able to develop OpenCards based on air and love only, we need some money to pay our daily ration of beer and pizza, the website fees, and a new computer all few years.

Therefore, if you would like us to continue our efforts towards a better (and always free) OpenCards, we would welcome a little donation from your side. If possible right now, because you're as forgetful as we are (otherwise you wouldn't use OpenCards). Many thanks! :-)

Donations are accepted via:

Because donations are managed by the sourceforge donation system, an OpenID is required for making donations.

Port it !

Although OpenCards is deployed as OpenOffice extension, it was implemented to be completely independent of a concrete flashcard-editor (like OpenOffice Impress). In order to port OpenCards to the flashcard-system of your choice (AbiWord, PowerPoint, etc.) you just need to implement 2 (!!) interfaces which are PresenterProxy and CardFileSerializer .