CONTRIBUTIONS -------------- This document is for people who wish to aid in the development of vLIB. NB: If you would just like to inform us of a bugfix, then please either send details of the fix to vlib@activefish.com or visit http://vlib.activefish.com/forum/ and leave a message on the forum, there is no signup required for the Feedback and Suggestions forums. 1. Getting started --------------------- Now if you would like to contribute to the project you're going to need CVS access to vLIB, which is hosted on SourceForge.net. Send an e-mail to vlib@activefish.com with your sf.net username and what it is that you're interested in developing. If all is well you'll be given CVS access to vLIB where you can start modifying, adding ..etc. NB: If you don't know how to use CVS you can learn more about it using the sourceforge documentation. The basics aren't very difficult and you should be able to pick it up fairly quickly. If you're using Win32, I suggest you use a tool called TortoiseCVS. This is easy to setup and lets you access CVS commands from Windows Explorer. You can find it at http://www.tortoisecvs.org/. 2. Coding Standards --------------------- vLIB is programmed using the same standards as the PEAR repository (http://pear.php.net/manual/en/standards.php). Make sure you program in this style as we don't like sloppy code. Most importantly, make sure your naming conventions are correct, the only difference between vLIB naming conventions and PEAR naming conventions is that vLIB classes use the "studly caps" method, like functions do, and the name of the file will represent the name of the main class within it; all other naming conventions are the same. Read the PEAR "Coding Standards" docs thouroughly to make sure you understand how to comment your code using PHPDoc style comments (http://phpdocu.sourceforge.net/) and to also see whether you should be on the list of authors in the header of each file. If you wish to add a new class to the library then create the file, copying the header from another file and away you go. If you file requires other classes than the main one to run, i.e. error classes ...etc then create a folder with the same name as the main class and put the file(s) in there. You're new class will probably need documentation, so you should checkout vlibdocs from CVS and create a new XML file. The easiest way is to do this is to probably copy one of the other files and modify it. The docs used by vLIB are in Aurigadoc format, download it at http://aurigadoc.sourceforge.net. Whenever you make a change, however small, make a note in the CHANGELOG.txt file. Briefly describe what you've done and put your name and the date on it (the date is in YYYY-MM-DD format to avoid confusion). When you commit the changelog back to CVS, just use '.' as the message. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you have any other questions, then please email vlib@activefish.com or visit http://vlib.activefish.com/forum/ and leave a message.