For most of the projects in which I’ve participated, there have been a few project owners that are allowed access to the master branch, and all other contributors submit new code through pull requests. I don’t see any similar feature of your SVN repository. How do you guys handle new contributors? Is it expected that developers will do all work on branches, and allow the project owners to merge them to trunk? Any other unwritten (or perhaps written, but unread by me) rules to which I should adhere?
Completely unrelated: In your bug tracker, what is the difference between “resolved” and “closed”?
There is no such policy. New developers just send us some patches (or one bigger) and get full access to repository if they want so and patches are OK. It works pretty well so far. There are not that many developers so all of them working on one branch is not a problem. There are only coding guidelines (on our wiki). You might find some of them (or lack of others) unusual but this set just seems to work well.
Bug gets resolved when a developer commits fix for it to trunk. It gets closed when someone else confirms it’s fixed. Bugs are usually closed after stable release (like 0.8, 0.81…) that is supposed to fix them.