Developer Collaboration

[Adrian Schneider]

Hi,

This is somewhat of a branch off Wayne's topic, but I don't want to disrupt that as there is a slight difference in goals.

Floris has been posting some good ideas lately, and I think we have all the tools we need in order to effectively work together on them without requiring any major infrastructure changes here at vBulletin.org.

Before I go any further, I'd be willing to help with this idea by posting tutorials and encouraging other people to give it a try. These tools are meant for huge collaboration projects, so they are definitely powerful enough to handle vBulletin products.



Version Control

First and foremost, we need to use version control. The two most popular contenders are Subversion and Git. I have been favoring Git lately, but either way will work. Git has an edge over Subversion, as it allows users to easily branch off each others work and projects will no longer fail because the original author has given up or has no time. In this model, it does not matter, because anybody can take over without messing up permissions or rights.

Collaboration Platform / Management

Next, we need a way to easily manage this source code. There are two very popular websites for this: SourceForge for Subversion, and GitHub for Git. This is where users can browse the code, track issues, and prepare packages for downloading.

Development Tools

I have been complaining for years about how ineffective working with the product system is for developers, and recently I have released a solution called VDE - vBulletin Development Environment. This tackles the problem on two points: 1) product data is split into separate files, so they can easily be managed by version control software, and 2) it automatically loads this data into memory as if it were active, so you don't have to import products either.



Where to start? I have been watching Floris' vBulletin Security Audit Product in the hatchery. I have also been looking for some example mods to use for VDE, as I don't have any good examples yet. Honestly, I've been wanting to help out on the project, but it's too much of a hassle to actually download the product, work on it, and re-upload it, because it's up to the original author to try and merge the code together. With products, this can sometimes be very difficult. With VDE in place, it would be very trivial to perform changes, and to actually watch them get placed into the master branch again. It takes very little effort on the original author's part.

I am willing to bet good money that with such a system in place, even as an experiment, you will see a huge surge in developer collaboration, and these mods will flourish. For the other developers here who have already taken some initiate with VDE, or with the audit project, please post some feedback here. I think we can do this, and it's easier than a lot of you think.