Getting involved

So, you want to get involved with the development of OpenPLi? Welcome aboard!

How do we work?

Before you start, we suggest you create a ticket, outlining your intentions. This way the maintainers of OpenPLi can see what you plan to do, give you advise, let you know if anyone else is working on the same idea, or let you know if what you want is even feasible. This makes sure that what you intent to start, you can also finish. It also provides other people information about what has been added, fixed or improved.

When you start working, you can use the ticket to inform other developers of the progress you are making. When finished, attach your patches to the ticket, so the maintainers can have a look at it, and when the patch is approved, apply it to the mainline code.

If you want to discuss your idea before you start, please visit the  PLi forums. This is also the place where you can discuss potential bugs that you have found.

Where to start?

There are a few starting points:

• Howto setup your own development environment
• Tickets: View active tickets, make bug reports and contribute feature requests.
• Little, easy improvements: Get your feet wet by taking on one of these small tasks.

Branches

Development of major new features for OpenPLi tends to take place in branches — copies of the main codebase focused on a particular feature. Using branches makes it easier to experiment with such sweeping changes without possibly breaking the trunk — the main line of development. For this kind of new feature development we will consider creating a branch for you in our repository. To file such a request, login to our  support site, and PM the webmaster.

Branches may not be stable, but they offer a chance to test out bleeding-edge code before it hits the mainline. Give them a try, and remember to send feedback to the branch developers!