Contributing to Photologue

Contributions are always very welcome. Even if you have never contributed to an open-source project before - please do not hesitate to offer help. Fixes for typos in the documentation, extra unit tests, etc... are welcome. And look in the issues list for anything tagged “easy_win”.

Example project

Photologue includes an example project under /example_project/ to get you quickly ready for contributing to the project - do not hesitate to use it! Please refer to /example_project/README.rst for installation instructions.

You’ll probably also want to manually install Sphinx if you’re going to update the documentation.

Workflow

Photologue is hosted on Github, so if you have not already done so, read the excellent Github help pages. We try to keep the workflow as simple as possible; most pull requests are merged straight into the master branch. Please ensure your pull requests are on separate branches, and please try to only include one new feature per pull request!

Features that will take a while to develop might warrant a separate branch in the project; at present only the ImageKit integration project is run on a separate branch.

Coding style

No surprises here - just try to follow the conventions used by Django itself.

Unit tests

Including unit tests with your contributions will earn you bonus points, maybe even a beer. So write plenty of tests, and run them from the /example_project/ with a python manage.py test photologue.

Documentation

Keeping the documentation up-to-date is very important - so if your code changes how Photologue works, or adds a new feature, please check that the documentation is still accurate, and update it if required.

We use Sphinx to prepare the documentation; please refer to the excellent docs on that site for help.

Note

The CHANGELOG is part of the documentation, so if your patch needs the end user to do something - e.g. run a South migration - don’t forget to update it!

Translations

Photologue manages string translations with Transifex. The easiest way to help is to add new/updated translations there.

Once you’ve added translations, give the maintainer a wave and he will pull the updated translations into the master branch, so that you can install Photologue directly from the Github repository (see Installation) and use your translations straight away. Or you can do nothing - just before a release any new/updated translations get pulled from Transifex and added to the Photologue project.

New features

In the wiki there is a wishlist of new features already planned for Photologue - you are welcome to suggest other useful improvements.

If you’re interested in developing a new feature, it is recommended that you first discuss it on the mailing list or open a new ticket in Github, in order to avoid working on a feature that will not get accepted as it is judged to not fit in with the goals of Photologue.

A bit of history

Photologue was started by Justin Driscoll in 2007. He quickly built it into a powerful photo gallery and image processing application, and it became successful.

Justin then moved onto other projects, and no longer had the time required to maintain Photologue - there was only one commit between August 2009 and August 2012, and approximately 70 open tickets on the Google Code project page.

At this point Richard Barran took over as maintainer of the project. First priority was to improve the infrastructure of the project: moving to Github, adding South, Sphinx for documentation, Transifex for translations, Travis for continuous integration, zest.releaser.

The codebase has not changed much so far - and it needs quite a bit of TLC (Tender Loving Care), and new features are waiting to be added. This is where you step in...

And finally...

Please remember that the maintainer looks after Photologue in his spare time - so it might be a few weeks before your pull request gets looked at... and the pull requests that are nicely formatted, with code, tests and docs included, will always get reviewed first ;-)