Contributing

Recently there has been some increased interest in contributing to Flourish. If you are interested in helping out with the project, Im sure that everyone who uses it would be very grateful. The way that things of have been going recently, Im going to start focusing more on approaching a stable release. Over the past year the beta has helped to improve the available functionality, increase its robustness and work out quite a number of bugs.

As the code moves to a stable release, I foresee more of a focus on improving documentation and writing tests. There are also currently a number of tickets for enhancements, plus there are some items on the original roadmap still to tackle.

So, if you do have interest in contributing to the project, please consider how you may be able to help out with:

• Writing patches for tickets
• Reading the documentation and providing edits or improvements
• Writing tests
• Answering questions in the forums

Im currently not looking to add much more to Flourish. Right now it serves as a fairly general-purpose library for website and application development, without being tied into third party services and without getting too much into markup generation. It has fairly good support across different environments and databases, and provides a more stream-lined API for a lot that is already possible with PHP.

Third party services things like twitter, flickr, payment gateways, etc all require keeping up with changes to the APIs. I feel that individual libraries will be better able to keep up with changes to the services and providing product-specific features. In regards to the generation of HTML, since there are so many different approaches and styles, I think staying out of that arena as much as possible will help me to stay focused on what Flourish already does.

If you are interested in writing code or editing documentation, please note that you will need to sign a contributor license agreement (CLA) to help protect users of Flourish and myself from legal issues.