Coding
Adium itself is written in the Objective-C language using Apple's Cocoa frameworks.
The libpurple protocol library which provides connectivity on many instant messaging services is written in C and maintained mostly by the developers of Pidgin.
If you are contemplating contributing and have experience in any of these languages (or you want to learn), dive right in!
- Getting Adium Source explains how to retrieve the Adium source code.
- Code Documentation offers information on documentation resources for the Adium code.
- Contributing Code outlines our patch policy by which you can submit changes for review and approval by the Adium team.
Continued contributors are often invited to join the team and thereby have direct write access to the code repository—not to mention international acclaim and the eternal jealousy of their peers! (See also the CommitterRules)
- Some handy tips & tricks can be found here.
If you're making an external / third party plugin,
- Toby's guide to creating an Adium plugin may be of help
- Patrick's blog post about creating an Adium plugin is good reading, too,
- you might find "fernyb"'s Xcode template for Adium Plugins helpful.