How to contribute
From FreeWay
Thanks for helping the Freeway eCommerce open source project. Here are some areas where you can help - if you have more ideas, feel free to post them publicly in our Docs forum or email us at collaborate(at)openfreeway.com.
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[edit] Contributing to Freeway: A win-win proposition
We believe that anyone can personally benefit from contributing to Freeway and the Freeway project. Whether you're an independent consultant, student, open source hacker, or even part of a company, contributing could be great for you.
Specifically for the company:
- Contributions to Core are Maintained by Freeway: If you contribute your enhancements to Freeway Core, they will become an integral part of the product and will be maintained, documented and tested through all subsequent versions. This means that, after the initial effort, you will not need to invest in upgrading these features anymore which will make your future upgrades smoother. This translates to significant savings in the total ownership cost for Freeway during the lifetime of the system.
- Free up Resources through Teamwork: Contributing to Freeway means having your features supported and improved by a group of developers leaving you more time for your own developments and installations. Whatever is included in the Core remains monitored for life.
- Work with People with Common Goals: Whether by leveraging work done by other people or collaborating on a section of development, you are given the chance to push the development in your own direction by leading the way. The product will support what you want, when you want it. This also helps ensure that your priorities, issues and features become a goal of the whole community.
And for individuals as well:
- Gain recognition and exposure: Make yourself known in a community of individuals and companies deploying professional open source solutions.
- Networking: Meet and work with others who are just like you, which opens a potential for landing a job or other professional opportunities worldwide.
- Build something you believe in: Help build a free and open source infrastructure that can be used for companies and non-governmental organizations alike. NGO's and non-profit organizations are using our code free of charge, saving a lot of money in the process.
- Learn and Apply Skills: Enhance your knowledge by working on open technologies like PHP, XML and Web related technologies. These are today's industry standard tools for building professional software solutions. Also, your work is edited and tested by your peers, the Freeway developers around the world.
[edit] Forums: take part in helping other users
Do you have experience installing, configuring or just using Freeway? Many people download and install Freeway every day. Help them by answering their questions at Freeway forums. Share your knowledge and experiences with others and learn from the Freeway community.
[edit] Documentation
Learn how you can help with the Freeway documentation.
[edit] Create and improve documentation
Have you created a significant piece of documentation regarding the implementation, development or use of Freeway? Share it with us after creating an account in our Wiki.
[edit] Translate documentation
Most of the Freeway project documentation is here in project's Wiki. This allows people to modify and enhance it, but it also means everyone can translate the documentation in their own language. Are you a native speaker of another language? See how you can translate the Wiki documentation and help other people around the world use Freeway more easily.
[edit] Write a blog
Do you like using Freeway? Do you like to write and connect with other community members? Consider writing a blog about how you use Freeway (various articles and news). Blogs are superbly easy to set up and there are many free services (Blogger.com for example) that allow you to quickly set up a new blog and maintain it with little effort.
[edit] Freeway localization and internationalization
Freeway still not ready for your region? Check our Forumsto see if someone is already working on it and either help them or start a new localization project. A new localization feature is under way which will make the process really simple. Make sure to check our FAQ about localization issues as well as documentation on how to localize Freeway.
Being responsible for Freeway localization or translation for a particular region can serve as a huge competitive advantage for you and we would like to assist you in this effort. Freeway community has been very active in supporting these efforts in the Translations forum, which is monitored by Freeway's development team. In case Freeway is still not ready for your region, other projects can be achieved to get a complete localization for a country or region. Please read localization process.
[edit] Report bugs
Have you found a bug? Please, report it to us using our bug database. Make sure that you carefully read our Bug Reporting Guidelines before submitting your bug report. Even better, you can also propose a bug fix for the issue.
[edit] Contributing ideas and feature requests
Do you have an idea for Freeway? You can fill up a feature request. This process just communicates an idea to Freeway which will implement the idea at its discretion. Since Freeway is an open source project, you can implement an idea into the product yourself. See the next sections.
[edit] Contributing new features
Some suggestions to consider when working on a functionality:
- Be consistent with the current design principles of Freeway:
- based on open standards
- client server web based architecture
- support for all web browsers. etc
- Design in the open. Before you start coding a single line, make a proposal of the design of the new functionality at Freeway developers forum.
- Be consistent with the current design principles of Freeway:
[edit] Proposing new features
You can propose or discuss new features or fill up a feature request in the Freeway bug tracking system. If you or your company need a new functionality, we advise you to refer to the development tutorials and hope that you will allow us to share your work with all users.
When making a proposal, please consider adding the following information:
- Which functionality are you considering (requirements/objectives)?
- How this fits in the current Freeway functionality?
- Which Freeway modules are affected?
- How many resources can you devote?
- How long do you expect it will take to develop?
Share you idea and get feedback from the community. This also helps to avoid the duplication of efforts.
[edit] Contributing code snippets
Code snippets are small pieces of reusable code which resemble small cooking recipes. There is a category in the Freeway Wiki called Code Snippets created to keep these in one place. If you have small samples of how to customize Freeway, small changes to the code that you think may be useful to other people, please create a new page on the Freeway Wiki and add it.
[edit] Contributing fixes
Do you have a fix for a bug in Freeway? You need to create a file listing the changes you made, called a patch. When the patch is ready, attach it to the right bug report.
[edit] Developer group
We are starting a community development workgroup which aims at the development of a cutting edge, state of the art eCommerce platform. This workgroup will be the driving and building force behind new versions of Freeway. Together with the other working groups we will try to realize this ambition.
We are seeking new talent will be very careful about whom we select because this workgroup will determine the overall quality of Freeway. Most of the times we get in touch with you when we see some interesting workaround, but if you think you are the talent we seek, you can also contact us by posting an application into the Developers forum. The best way to grab our attention is to start committing code in Bazaar for us to evaluate – See the Code repository pages for details. Before you do, please bear in mind that we need the following:
- You need to be available at least 8 hours per week.
- Education (or still being a student) in informatics with knowledge of modern development methods and techniques.
- Great knowledge of programming techniques like patterns and object orientation.
- Experience with PHP, MySQL and Webservices.
When applying, please give us as much information as possible, so we could properly asses your skills. If you don't want to put all your personal information in here, send a personal message to the workgroup leader, Prasanna.
[edit] Continuous Evolution
Freeway is in continuous evolution. Check our roadmap to see the list of features planned for the next versions of the product.
[edit] Freeway License
Contributions to Freeway are made under the GPL V2 license. You can learn about the Freeway License here.