Development Involvement

Open Development Goals

The osCommerce Development Site provides public access to the development progress and most up to date sources of the osCommerce solution, and opens the development process for external developers to participate in and to help improve the core framework project releases are based on.

The goals of the development site is to foster a development community behind the project where numerous groups can be organized to each focus on a separate area of the project that include (but not limited to):

• Core Framework
• Languages
• Usability / User Interface
• Database Optimizations and Independency
• Prototypes / Testing

Participation In Development

Participating in the development of the project in one or more groups is welcome to anyone that is able to dedicate the necessary amount of resources for it, including communicating with other developers in the IRC channel and on the Development forum channel.

The development groups that are formed are to converse with the osCommerce development team. The responsibility of the osCommerce development team includes being the primary drive behind project development and progress, maintaining the communication channels available, and to support the development groups that are formed. Developers that are able to dedicate a large amount of resources to the project are welcome to apply for a position in the osCommerce development team.

Each developer is given their own working copy of the latest sources (found in /trunk/) in their own branch (found in /branches/), where they are free to express their creativity and explore their development skills without interrupting the main /trunk/ directory.

Work that has been agreed on by the development team to include in the core code-base of the project must first be finalized and working in the developers branch directory. After completion and approval by a team member it can then be merged over to the /trunk/ directory to be made available in the next project release made.

Development Services Provided

The osCommerce Development Site will extend its services provided as it matures and will cater especially to contribution authors and their add-ons in the near future. The current focus of the development site is to finalize the framework for the 3.0 release and to gather ideas of improvements for future project releases, which differs to the focus contribution authors have which require stable project releases to base their add-ons to.

Everyone is also welcome to join the IRC channel whether they have the resources to join a development group or not, to be able to participate in the discussions held there.