How to Contribute to WACT
The WACT projects welcomes contribution.
Various methods of contribution are listed here. Try some of the things on this page, lurk on the Development Mailing list for a while, or just join the list and post a “What can I work on” message.
Review
Checkout the CVS version of WACT. Run the examples. Try it out. Report your impressions on the reviews page, post to the mailing list, or post requests at the feature request tracking system and bugs at the Bug Tracking System.
Documentation
A really good way to contribute is by participating on this Wiki. The API documentation contains links back into the Wiki. If you find anything unclear or have a useful example which illustrates how WACT is used, please add it to the Wiki.
For more information read the WACT WACT Documentation Philosophy. Learn about wikis and feel free to contribute to the organic documentation here.
We are also looking for full length tutorials. If you can contribute one of these, add it here or inform the WACT development mailing list.
Testing
A good way to learn WACT is to write some unit tests for untested portions of the framework. A good place to start is How to run the WACT Test Suite. Another place to start is by joining the mailing list and ask about which areas need unit tests.
The WACT test runner supports the generation of line coverage reports for the unit tests. To find out which areas of WACT need better testing, run one of these reports. Identify areas that are poorly tested with the report. Then, write tests that improve the test coverage.
Unit testing in WACT is powered by SimpleTest. XDebug is required to generate code coverage reports.
Programming
The WACT Package Breakdown contains a list of tasks for the upcoming releases of WACT.
Development on WACT is largely self directed. Browse the roadmap and pick something that you might be interested in doing, or post a “What can I work on” message to the mailing list. Then announce to the mailing list that you have taken on a task. If you are unsure of how to do something, post questions back to the mailing list.
Good skills for WACT development include the ability to run the full test suite on your development machine (including web tests and db tests) and the ability to use CVS.
A good text editor with php highlighting and multi-file search and replace using regular expressions is extremely helpful for navigating the framework.