Got a question? Need some help? There are a number of ways to get technical and user support through our community. Read on to find out how and ask away!
Mailing Lists
Mailing lists are the primary way we communicate in the Mifos community. They work like this: You sign up for the list. Once approved, you can then send questions to the list via email. Everybody in our community on the mailing list sees your questions and can respond if they know how to help. All the questions and conversations are archived and publicly indexed so you can conveniently find answers by searching through Google.
For better ease of use, each of the mailing lists also has a web interface on Google Groups that allows you to search and post. To post via the web interface you first need to sign up for the mailing list itself and then the Google Group as well.
Apache Fineract Developers List
Writing code? Have a technical question? Building a new feature? All technical and development related questions and discussions related to the platform should happen on our Apache infrastructure. Have a question about how the Apache Fineract platform works or is designed? Want to discuss specs for a new feature. Here’s the place to go for all technical and non-technical questions related to Fineract.
- Subscribe: Send blank email to dev-subscribe@fineract.apache.org
- Send questions to dev@fineract.apache.org
- In addition, you can also browse the archives.
Mifos-Users Mailing List (non-technical)*
Have a question about how to use our Community App? Stuck while installing the Mifos distribution? Need to know how a feature or configuration setting is supposed to work? This is the place for those questions.
- Sign up for the mifos-users mailing list.
- Send questions to mifos-users@lists.sourceforge.net
- In addition, you can also browse or post through the web interface for mifos-users on Google Groups.
Mifos-Developer Mailing List (technical)*
Most likely if you’re doing technical work, you should converse on the Fineract List. If you’re only developing on the Community App or an app like the Android field officer, you can guide your questions here.
- Sign up for the mifos-developer mailing list.
- Send questions to mifos-developer@lists.sourceforge.net
- In addition, you can also browse or post through the web interface for mifos-developer on Google Groups.
Here are some tips and etiquette on how to ask good questions on the list. Visit MifosForge for full details on each of these lists and their archives.
*Current plans at the moment are to gradually migrate the traffic/communications for the Mifos mailings lists to our Mifos Forum powered by Discourse.
Mifos Forum
Our forum powered by Discourse aims to consolidate a number of our Mifos-specific communication and collaboration channels to augment the Fineract developer mailing lists. Mifos Forum can provide a user experience both via the browser as well as email that is highly indexable and searchable and fills the same needs for our mailing lists and previous Q&A tool, Mifos Connect.
Mifos Forum is being used to power Working Groups focused on strategic projects like Open Banking or Performance and Scalability and provides categories for the following:
- Development – for questions related to development on Mifos and its corresponding apps and modules
- Product Management – related to feature, UX, and design discussion related to Mifos and Fineract
- Support – for issues related to installing, deploying, hosting, using and configuring Mifos and Fineract
- Community – discussion regarding events, webinars, and ongoing programs like Google Summer of Code
- Marketplace – a jobs board to seek out services, volunteers, new hires, RFPs, etc.
- Mindmeld – an open forum to discuss and brainstorm trends facing the sector
- Spotlight – for case studies and profiles about Mifos users and solutions powered by Mifos and Fineract.
- Announcements – announcements regarding releases and news/press about the community and initiative.
Learn more about how we’re using our Forum and sign up and join the discussion at https://forum.mifos.org.
MifosConnect
MifosConnect is a social Question and Answer platform to complement our mailing lists. Think of it as StackOverflow for Mifos. This will be used to organically build out a community knowledge base for product support, volunteer engagement, partner onboarding, technical questions, and more.
This is a great collaborative way to get support, give help and a fun way to build your identity and reputation in the community. Create an account and start asking away. We currently have the following spaces:
- Product Support: How the product works – Questions about Using/Configuring Mifos and its functionality (thinkmifos-users list)
- Developer Zone: How to contribute to the platform – technical questions about using the API, writing new code, etc. (think mifos-developers list)
- Community Engagement: Participating in the community, how to find help, how to volunteer, etc.
- Partner Onboarding: Questions about becoming a partner, how to get certified, what services to offer, how to find MFIs, how to promote Mifos, how to get training, etc.
- Financial Inclusion: Knowledge sharing about financial inclusion – methodologies, products, processes, in general building out knowledge around FI (especially for those who are new to the sector)
Live Chat on Gitter
Have a question you need an answer for right away? Want to chat with other developers or users? Our Gitter chatroom is the place for you. Number of people in the chatroom depends on the time you go in.
Still using IRC? Well you can still join from your traditional IRC client so we can have the best of both worlds. Follow these instructions to connect to the IRC server, then join the #openMF/mifos channel.
Using Gitter
New to Gitter? You can learn all about using it at https://gitter.zendesk.com/hc/en-us.
Traditional IRC Clients
Chatzilla
Chatzilla is a simple and straightforward IRC client. It is a available as a Firefox plugin. If you don’t have Firefox, install that first.
Pidgin
Pidgin is a feature-rich instant messaging client that can handle many protocols, including IRC. See this guide for tips on configuring Pidgin as your IRC client for #mifos.
Etiquette
- All mailing list etiquette also applies to the IRC channel.
- It may be tempting to repeat your question many times. Strive for patience instead. You may need to wait on the channel for many hours before receiving a response.
- Do not privately message others in the channel. Mentioning their nickname in #mifos is enough.
Other hints
- Many full-time Mifos developers are active during USA business hours.
- If you don’t get a response, you may try again several hours later or earlier in the day.
- Once you have your IRC client installed, just click on irc://freenode/#mifos and you should be signed on to the channel.
- Register your nickname. It helps people recognize you, protects your identity, and allows you to send private messages.
- If you find you don’t like Pidgin or Chatzilla, there are many other options to choose from.
- If you want to share, for instance, a stack trace or diff more than a few lines long, use a pastebin.
- mifosbot is there to log channel activity. If you want mifosbot to ignore something, preface it with
[nolog](including the square brackets)