History: 3Rules

the 3 rules

Used by mose in recruitment ceremonial to ive in oneline the maximum of help on how to collaborate in Tikiwiki.

I wish to follow those 3 rules, and I also wish to convince anyone in TikiWiki community to respect those simple obvious rules:

1. Preserve Environment
   Tikiwiki is a software and also a community. The mix of both, contextualized in the Internet and the real life, is called The Environment. Any change in TikiWiki should take in account the more possible from this environment, to give changes of a balanced evolution respectful for humans and computers.
2. Commit early, Commit often
   CVS is the central point in tikiwiki collaborative development. CVS commits have to be frequent even at first stages to offer an opportunity of interaction between contributors. It provides more chances for transversal communication in benefit of the respect of environment.
3. Make it Optional
   TikiWiki is used in various contexts and its modularity is very appreciated. Preserve it by making most of your changes optional, accessible for tuning to the admin at least, via admin panels.

verbose mode

1. Think about other users
   Tiki is both a piece of software and a community of real people. This combination means that you as a developer must think not only of the code, but of the wide variety of people other than yourself who use Tiki everyday. Any changes should be considered in this context and should take a careful, thoughtful, and highly colaborative approch. This maintains the respect for both the code and the people that depend on it. Tiki is not a game and changes you make affect the lives of real people.
2. Share Early, Share Often
   If you have an idea for an improvement, new feature, performance enhancement, or anything else share it soon. Be proud of your idea and get it out there on the e-mail list. Be open to problems and issues that others may point out. As you work out your ideas and implementations, share your progress and approch often. Ask for advice, there are alot of smart people here who love to help. Document everything on TikiWiki.org and keep it up to date with changes. Create a showcase site to show off your work in progress. Once it basicly works and the community likes it, commit your code to CVS often so others can help with the development and debugging.
   One big caution: Don't commit sweeping or wide reaching changes to CVS untill there is community concenus that it is the right thing to do. You can really screw up other people's lives and projects this way. When in doubt, talk about it on IRC and email somemore.
   Big caution about the caution : I feel it is not possible to reach consensus without effective code. Asking before is a matter of gathering information, not getting prior acceptation of something. Good decisions can provide bad implementations and in such cases there is a difficulty to get rid of it as it was consensued beforehand (without really knowing). Of course, that only aply to experienced coders that are suposed to know what they do. People that learn have to be cautious, but not for authoritative reasons, just by wisdom (if available). my 2 cents. — mose
3. Make It Optional
   Tiki is used in the real world by MANY people for MANY different uses. Try to avoid forcing new features onto everyone, allow it to be tuned and configured by the site admin, and, if at all possible, allow it to be turned off. At the very least, make sure that the default config doesn't change Tiki's behavior.