Etherpad allows you to edit documents collaboratively in real-time, much like a live multi-player online editor, allowing you to write articles, proposals, press releases and the like, together with your friends, your fellow students or your colleagues, working on the same document at the same time. It even supports rich text editing! Additionally, Etherpad provides access to all data through a well-documented HTTP API and supports import/export to many major data exchange formats. The built-in plugin system makes extending the core functionality a breeze, regardless of whether you're adding support for inserting images or videos or allowing users to collaborate on tables.
Try the live demo!
The current version of Etherpad (previously known as Etherpad lite) is based entirely on node.js, allowing us to share code between the client and the server and taking advantage of node's non-blocking I/O. As a consequence, Etherpad-lite is much more lightweight and more stable (but not less complete!) than the original Etherpad. A smaller, manageable and well-documented code base makes it easier for developers to understand the code and improve the project with their contributions.
Etherpad is an open source project. And that means, that everything, from this website to the core of the application itself, has been contributed by passionate, helpful individuals (such as yourself) who liked what they saw and wanted to make something better of it. So if you like what you see, and want to make something better of it, we'd like to see your contributions. It doesn't matter how familiar you are with real-time applications, or whether you know how to write programs for Node.js. There are plenty of ways to be helpful! Just ask!
One of the first things you should do is actually use Etherpad, and get to know it, read about it, evangelise it, and engage with the wider community. Learn, how to write plugins or translate the user interface to your mother tongue. Be creative!
If you want to help, get in touch!
The main development happens on Github. To contribute, fork the main repo, branch off a feature branch from develop, make your changes and commit them, push to your fork and submit a pull request for ether/develop.
Once in a while we merge develop into master, which results in a new release. This means you will always find the latest stable version in the master branch.
Many individuals, companies and organizations have contributed to Etherpad Lite. We'd like to thank them all!
Additionally, our thanks go out to the tens of thousands of developers and organizations who have created all the modules we depend on or contributed in some way to our ability to provide Etherpad Lite as open source.
We'd also like to thank you. You, who've been making Etherpad Lite what it is, if you've been developing awesome features or plugins, whether you're runnning an instance or you're just one of our diligent users.
Thank you!
Copyright © 2013 The Etherpad Foundation | Design by Marcel Klehr
The Etherpad logos by Marcel Klehr are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
