Licence to changes

Question

We're doing fairly significant changes to our copy of Q2A - we don't aim to redistribute, but we might be using it on more than one site (keeping one branch for development and meta task, and periodically syncing it with the 'main' site), as well as possibly letting other sites use our patches as needed.

Thus-is there a mechanism to contribute changes to the platform? some of the things we're planning on doing arn't community specific, and we'd like to contribute them back once they work, or make available just the patches as gpl for other site owners- they'd need to apply the latter themselves.

If so, are there any coding standards we need to ask our coders to adhere to? It wouldn't be an issue for internal use but if we wanted to contribute back, its better to know

Answer 1

Thanks for the question, and I appreciate the offer of code.

Question2Answer is still in its first beta, so I feel it's a little premature to put a mechanism in place for user contributions. There are some significant changes coming in beta 2 - to voting, notifications and post types - plus a whole bunch of smaller fixes. So I don't feel the code base is yet stable enough.

You are nonetheless welcome to make any patches to 1.0b1 available as GPL - no problem with that at all - you can post here with the link. The main coding standard is to use the prefix qa_ for functions or global variables, and QA_ for constants - that way you will keep the PHP namespace clean.

Beyond that, it would be really helpful if you'd contact me at Q2A feedback - http://www.question2answer.org/feedback.php - to let me know what sorts of changes you are working on. I can then integrate these myself, or perhaps put in place an appropriate plug-in mechanism that will keep the interface between Q2A and your code clean, even while Q2A goes through future changes.