I wanted to let people know about a part of my site I am dedicating to phpwcms development. This is NOT an official part of phpwcms by any means but merely a place to help support phpwcms by contributing hacks you have made, themes, templates, tutorials and/or anything else that would help someone make phpwcms the best cms system for them.
The reason for this is so we can have a central place to find additions to phpwcms that are not really appropriate for the bulk of phpwcms users (ie Oliver has not put in b/c he doesn't see a need for it... yet
). A couple examples would be something like a bulletin board add in or a calender add in which have both been discussed on the message board here. If you work on a good implementation of adding a bulletin board into phpwcms that you think others might be able to use easily then you can submit it so others can download it if they want to try and use it. This will not be a place to say "I added a sweet bulletin board feature, {PHP:mybulletinboard.php}". This means that whatever feature you add should be included within the phpwcms admin area in a logical way so the cms will be seamless in appearance.
NOTICE: THESE WILL NOT BE ADDED TO PHPWCMS!!!
The point is to offer up the custom solutions you created for others to use and not to add new features to phpwcms. At the moment Oliver has that covered and has expressed that he has his plans for adding features and improvements that he will be doing. So if you make some sweet feature you think everyone and their brother will want, then submit it to me and see if people use it but do not think that it will be added to the official phpwcms project. Your hacks will be just that, hacks. Until Oliver is ready with documentation and a plan for how to contribute code then we can only consider these hacks for consideration in the future and not official add ins to the cms. Until then they will just be available for people to mess with and try out. No warranties or support. Just quick hacks to scratch an itch. I hope this is clear b/c it is merely meant to take the solutions developers have made and have a central place to make them public and not convolute or make phpwcms buggy. It is a like a piece of scratch paper and not the final copy. I hope I have made this clear.
If you do submit a feature patch it needs to have documentation on what files will need to be added and where. You will need to state explicitly how to update everything to make your feature work. It should be understood that the feature is to be applied to the main current version of phpwcms and not some hacked version you have created. You also need to give a description of what you did to make things work and the code should be commented to reflect this. This all meant to help foster a good developer community for when Oliver can make submissions organized and helpful rather than a pain. All submissions must be made known on the phpwcms messageboard so Oliver can know about it and can say "get that piece of crap off the Internet" or "hey this is really good and will be added to the next release" or "I don't care about whatever you are talking about". In other words Oliver has veto power about what will go up and just because it is available DOES NOT mean it is endorse by Oliver in any way.
I hope all this is clear and as I get things up a running we will make policies more specific. The main idea is to do what we can as a community to help out the community. The main focus is not getting your hack up as fast as possible but rather getting more familiar with the code so we can provide better support, tutorials and code to the main project. Please give me a message if you have any questions or comments and please understand that this is not Oliver's responsibilty so do not ask him about it make comments to him. If it becomes a problem in any way to Oliver it will be done so think before you act.
Lastly attitude is important so please make your best effort to help Oliver and the project as a whole before you help yourself. Write that tutorial and help that person in the support forum before taking weeks and weeks to add some feature. Documentation is key here so if you do something that you think would be helpful to the phpwcms in general, please write about it for the community as a whole.
I hope this can help to make phpwcms better and have an organized development community that Oliver can be proud of.
the url will be:
http://ionrock.umemusic.com/index.php?develphpwcms
(i'm just 3d artist with ideas above my ability)
