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<document url="http://castor.org/support.xml">
  <body>
    <title>Castor Support</title>

    <section title="Introduction">
        
       <p>Castor is an open-source product. This means that the source code is
          available at no charge and may be obtained using <a href="scm.xml">SVN</a> or
         <a href="download.xml">downloaded</a> via the Codehaus distribution server.</p>
	   
       <p>Since castor is freely available, including the source code,
          there is no guaranteed level of support available. The online
          <a href="#Documentation">documentation</a> is the best place to start. If 
          you have trouble or have more advanced questions not available in the online 
          documentation, then please consider subscribing to one of the various 
          available <a href="lists.xml">mailing lists</a> or join the
          <a href="/phpBB2">Castor Forums</a>. In general, the lists and forums 
          are the best place to ask questions about the product.</p>
	   
	   <p>Due to our move to <a href="http://www.codehaus.org">the Codehaus</a> in January 
		  2005, we greatly benefit from the infrastructure available at this site, and are
		  in a position to offer you additonal communication channels:
          
          <ul>
            <li>Join us on the #castor IRC channel at irc.codehaus.org, where you'll mainly be 
                able to talk to committers and fellow users/developers exchanging ideas and 
                bouncing off problems. For those of you behind firewalls, please use the
                HTTP deamon available at <url>http://irc.codehaus.org</url></li>
          </ul></p>
		  
		<p>Please note, though, that for problems of any kind, you should still use one of 
		   the mailing list as your prefered way of communicating to us, as this enables other
           users to browse through old mails at one of the available mailing list
           archives, and/or search for specific items.</p>
    </section>

    <section title="Documentation">
        
       <p>The online documentation is available throughout the website. To get started
          simply click on the appropriate sections listed in the menu bar located to the
          left side of this page.</p>
          
      <p>If you can't find something in the documentation, try looking through the
         examples (as shipped as part of the source distribution).</p>
         
      <p>There are also numerous <a href="presentations.xml">presentations and articles</a>
         available about Castor to help get you started.</p>

    </section>

    <section title="Reporting Bugs and Bug Tracking">
        
       <p>If you find a bug, please file a report at Codehaus' issue management system (JIRA) 
          available at <url>http://jira.codehaus.org/browse/CASTOR</url></p>
          
       <p>Before submitting bugs or asking for features to be added/implemented, please read the
          <a href="http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html">Bugzilla Etiguette</a> and
          <a href="http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/bugwritinghelp.html">Bug Writing Guidelines</a> from Mozilla.org.
          as a general introduction to submitting such requests.</p>

    </section>

    <section title="Commercial Support">
        
       <p>Commercial support is not provided through this project at this time. Having said that,
          please note that there is a growing number of third party individuals/companies 
          providing such support, as detailed <a href="professional-services.html">here</a>.</p>
    </section>

  </body>
</document>




