What is MaNGOS?
The MaNGOS project is a full featured World of Warcraft server suite, including servers for authentication, client updates, world content serving, and battlegrounds. Additional features include tools to build and develop game content.
MaNGOS is an educational project. This means, our primary interest is to learn and teach us and our users more about C++ project development in a large scale. Our software is not intended for running public servers, and we do not support that.
Platform support
MaNGOS is available for Windows (32-bit and 64-bit), and most — if not all — platforms where GCC 4.3 and the autoconf toolchain is available. This applies to both servers and tools.
Pitch In to help the Project
Like any community-run project, everything that happens happens because we — the MaNGOS Community — make it happen. And there's so much more to a successful open source project than a bunch of people writing code—oh SO much more.
If you don't feel like you have the chops to contribute on the development side or would just help in additional ways to build this project and community into something special, we've got plenty of things you can do:
- Help us feed the hamsters powering the website.
- Help us write documentation for the project or the software.
- Design a badge for people to display on their sites.
- Be a wiki gnome and help us keep our wiki garden well tended.
It doesn't stop there. If you don't see something you want to do, let us know what you do want to do and we'll make you the MaNGOS chieftain of That Thing!
Improve the Software
The MaNGOS project is powered by a powerful cast of characters comprised of several languages and technologies. These include:
- The MaNGOS core is written in C/C++,
- our database backends of choice are MySQL and PostgreSQL, so we use SQL, too,
- we use shell scripts to spice up development,
- we document our code using Doxygen,
- project documentation is living inside MedaWiki.
If you are familiar with any one of these, you can (and, dare we say, should!) contribute to the MaNGOS software. Here's how...
We use GitHub for source code repository because it's the best solution we've found to not only track projects but to make collaboration between project teams easy.
If this is your first exposure to GitHub, just imagine a centralized home for holistic product management crossed with a bustling Turkish bazaar overlayed by Facebook. Minus the updates about what people had for lunch. We like GitHub.
Read our contributor guidelines
While our guidelines do not cover every "Huh?" moment, we have at least a few guides for sending patches, setting up your Git environment, and formatting / documenting your code submissions.
Download the code
In order to contribute, the first thing you should do is download the code. Although we strongly suggest that code contributors (especially frequent contributors) learn the basics of Git (the version control software we use), it's really important to us that anyone who has something to contribute be able to do so without barriers that might otherwise keep them on the sidelines.
So, if you're not up for Git, you can actually find tar/gz compressed downloads on the GitHub download page for the MaNGOS project. Using that code, you can make your changes and then get them to us using the following method:
- Create a patchfile by performing a recursive diff between your MaNGOS source directory and a pristine copy of it. Don't be scared! It's actually much easier than it sounds. The nice folks in the IRC will be happy to help you with this if you need it.
- Create a new case in LightHouse, attaching your patch file and any new or changed binary assets (e.g. images) to the case
- In the case, explain fully what you did so that the reviewer can easily understand
And that's it! You've contributed. Congratulations and make sure to pick up your Awesome Merit Badge on the way out!
Regardless of whether your new to all of this or an old hand, we sincerely welcome and appreciate all of your contributions and the fact that you're a part of our community.
Send in Feedback and Ideas
If you are MaNGOS contributor or even a user of MaNGOS then we want to help get your issues resolved quickly. If you have found a bug, what you think might be a bug or have an idea for a feature then tell us about it. Or if you just have a stupendous idea that simply must be done, we definitely want to hear!
We use Lighthouse for tracking bug reports and feature requests related to the MaNGOS source code, web site and related resources. We also use Lighthouse for tracking each of MaNGOS' release milestones.
Create a new ticket
You can create tickets via the web interface. If this is your first time logging a ticket with the project, please continue reading.
View and search existing tickets
Tips for creating tickets
Lighthouse, the ticket system we use for MaNGOS, uses Markdown to help us all create nicely formatted tickets without all the fuss of HTML. See "How to format text in email." Markdown is also used for tickets submitted through the web interface.
Search First! To help us all build the best product possible, it is essential for us to collect all relevant and related information relating a problem or idea in the same place. It is also important to be respectful of everyone's time by actively working to reduce the number of redundant and duplicate tickets in the system. So, before you file a ticket, please go to the ticket system and use the search bar at the top of the listing to see if your issue has already been reported. Lighthouse's search system is pretty robust, so be sure to check out "Searching for tickets" for tips and tricks to find the ticket you might be looking for.