If you want to contribute to Maintain as a programmer, there are several things you could help us with.

What you should know is a little bit of PHP and SQL. We try to follow the PEAR Coding Standards as closely as possible. Please take some time to read through these before you start contributing.

Code Contribution Guide

Obtaining a copy of the source code

To start working on the Maintain code, you have to set up your own copy of the source code. To do this, you need to have the subversion revision control system installed. Connect to our SVN repository with the following command:

$ svn co https://svn.osuosl.org/public/maintain-project/trunk maintain

Make sure to get this version up and running, following the INSTALL file, so you can test your changes.

The Bug Tracking System

The first place to start looking is the Maintain bug tracker, called JIRA. You can find it at bugs.osuosl.org. There is a Maintain 3.1 section where we collect bugs and improvements for the development version of Maintain.

Take a look at the open issues. If you feel like you want to implement one of the tasks, first create an account in JIRA. Afterwards, contact us on IRC or on out mailing lists, or just leave a comment on the respective JIRA issue. We will then assign the issue to you so you can start working.

You can obviously start on issues before it was assigned to you, but we highly recommend that you contact us first to avoid conflicting development. If multiple people want to work on the same issue, we can help you get in touch with each other.

New Features

You can also work on something that is not in the bug tracking system yet. Our goal is to have Maintain be as modular as possible. Most functionality should therefore be implemented as modules.

To discuss your idea, you may drop by the IRC channel or mailing lists. Eventually, you should file a new task on JIRA. Make sure that the same issue does not exist in the list already.

There is a Code Contribution Laundry List with a few feature ideas, if you need somewhere to start. You can also add new feature ideas there if you don't want to implement them on your own.

How to submit your changes

If you wish to submit a module, please view the module writing guide.

If you fixed a bug and changed files in the Maintain source tree, you should make a diff file using

$ svn diff > mypatch.diff

To submit this patch file, go to your issue on JIRA and click on attach file in the menu (on the left hand side of the screen).

After you uploaded your patch, the Maintain team will evaluate it and consider it for inclusion in the Maintain source.

Thanks for your help!