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•  Create a ticket in the DSpace Issue Tracker (describe your contribution, how to use it, and perhaps some use cases).
•  Make sure your code adheres to our Code Style Guide
•  Submit your code (preferably via GitHub). It is HIGHLY recommended to do so via a GitHub Pull Request (see GitHub's "About Pull Requests", or our notes on Development with Git), which references your newly created ticket by number (e.g. DS-1234).  If you are uncomfortable with Git/GitHub, you may instead attach a patch to the ticket you created. Be warned that the review/approval process for patch files is often much slower, as we first must locate someone to create a Pull Request on your behalf.
  
•  Review your own code. Does it follow our Contribution Checklist? Does it need Documentation? If you are using any third party tools/APIs, do they all have an acceptable Open Source License (see Licensing of Contributions)? The Committers will also be reviewing these aspects of your code, but if you can catch these gaps or issues up front it can speed up the process of correcting them.
  
•  Respond to feedback. If the Committers ask questions or make suggestions for changes, please try to be responsive. The Committers are all volunteers and are trying to help as best we can, but the process moves more quickly if you can try to be responsive as well.
•  Help rework/update code as needed. If suggestions for changes are made, if you can rework the code, it speeds up the process. If you submitted your code as a Pull Request, you can just quickly add changes/updates to the branch linked to from your Pull Request.
•  Ask questions. If there is a long delay in the Committers responding, or if you aren't sure of the status of your contribution, please ask. We'd be glad to explain whether the delay is just because we are all busy, or if there's something else we are waiting on.
•  Pay attention to release deadlines. As the next DSpace release approaches, the Committers will announce a "Contribution Deadline" for the upcoming release (usually the release schedule & deadlines are emailed to all lists in July/August). In order to keep releases on-time, the Committers must set a date after which they can no longer accept new feature contributions.  Although you may add code contributions year round, they will only be considered for a specific release if they are contributed before that release's contribution deadline.
  

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• Please be sure to share your plans with the DSpace community on the 'dspace-devel' list (or via one of the weekly Developer Meetings) before embarking on any sizable development effort. This will ensure you achieve your goals in a way that is consistent with the DSpace architecture and plans of the rest of the community. It will minimize the chances of a scenario where you have invested a large amount of time and effort into a body of code that does not fit in with the DSpace architecture or the consensus of the community.
• Develop incrementally; try and implement and contribute a basic form of your feature as soon as possible, rather than aiming to implement a complete and 'polished' solution. This will help ensure you're on the right track with regards to the rest of the DSpace community and platform. The sooner your code is part of the core code base, the less time you will have to spend 'chasing' the main code base, i.e. keeping your changes up-to-date with that core code base.
• Obtain the DSpace code using GitHub (see also Development with Git). This will make code management much easier. It's very simple to do; see Developer Guidelines and Tools.
• Read Code Contribution Guidelines (this page) and Code Style Guide to ensure you are following DSpace conventions. This will ensure your code is more likely to be immediately accepted as part of out-of-the-box DSpace.
• Ensure that any third-party tools/libraries that you plan to utilize are released under compatible open source licenses. See the Licensing of Contributions section below.
• For Larger Initiatives/Codebases: If you are building out a much larger project, we highly recommend notifying the community of the work early on via an email to dspace-devel@googlegroups.com. This can help find collaborators or get early feedback. We also recommend you develop your project in GitHub, as it provides easier ways to review/collaborate with other developers.

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1. Any changes must be Java 1.7 compliant.
2. When possible, your contribution should be a "Pull Request" sent to our GitHub repository (see Development with Git). However, you may also create a patch against the latest version of the code (but submitting a patch may delay the review process, as we will need to locate a volunteer to create a Pull Request on your behalf).
   
   • Any patches submitted should be small diffs (no large all encompassing patches!) using the unified output format. If you need help with generating a patch, there are many good resources out on the web. Here are just a few:
     
     • How to Create a Patch
     • Creating Patchs
     • Ten Minute Guide to Diff and Patch
   Ensure the code is commented and correctly formatted (you can use many IDE's format functions to do that or a tool like Jacobe ). Refer to the Coding Conventions section below.
3. Your code should adhere to our Java Code Style Guide.  Most major IDEs can easily import our Checkstyle configurations to ensure alignment with this code style
4. Your contribution must adhere to licensing requirements to be included. Refer to the Licensing of Contributions below
5. User interface patches must be internationalised (see the Internationalization Support (I18nSupport) guide)
6. User interface patches must be XHTML-compliant and have a W3C WAI Conformance Level of "Double-A"
7. Where possible, new User Interface features are encouraged to support both XMLUI and JSPUI interfaces. However, this is not a requirement. Patches supporting only one interface may be accepted.
8. Your patch must come with Documentation. Minimally, technical documentation must be part of the system docs – see Documentation Contributions below. Ideally, we'd also like User/Usage Documentation.
9. Examples or Use Cases should be submitted to help Committers understand and adequately test the patch prior to applying it to the core code
10. Any new features should be configurable (i.e. try not to make features specific to your own institution, they need to be generalized if possible). Be careful in particular with the dspace.cfg file. Make sure you only patch this if you change involved new configuration parameters in it, and make sure you have good default values for them. Don't accidentally include your own local configuration parameters (e.g. host name etc) in the patch! If the new feature is in any way specific to a particular application (e.g. open access, theses), it should be switched off by default
11. If you add new configuration parameters, name them appropriately. Also, they should not be required to be in dspace.cfg – if the parameters are omitted, DSpace should continue to operate as before.
    
    • For example, if you add a new e-thesis-related submission step, you might add a couple of new config parameters: webui.submit.thesisstep, and webui.submit.thesisstep.color. If webui.submit.thesisstep = false, the submission process should not be affected for those not using DSpace for e-theses. Also, if your code finds that webui.submit.thesisstep is missing, it should assume a default of 'false' so that after an update, previous installations of DSpace behave as expected, and they do not have to add that parameter to their dspace.cfg.
12. Add appropriate WARN, INFO and DEBUG-level logging. Use the included Apache Log4J toolkit, in concert with the org.dspace.core.LogManager class to do this. See org.dspace.app.webui.servlet.DSpaceServlet for an example of how to do this.
13. Retain backwards compatibility where possible. If there are questions/concerns about this, let us know. There are always exceptions.
14. No Database schema changes unless absolutely necessary – this will mean upgrading would require effort. In this case, you also need to supply upgrade instructions and/or code to upgrade in existing installation. See Database schema changes below.
15. If your patch makes changes to the database schema or content, and you are patching more than one branch (for example, 5_x and master), see Patching multiple branches below.

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Coding Conventions

Your code needs to follow the Sun Java code conventions with the following minor modifications:

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See Code Style Guide for detailed Java coding conventions and rules. The code style must be followed for Pull Requests, otherwise the automated build/test process may fail (i.e. it will throw errors related to code style violations).

Your code should be well commented with Javadoc (including package and class overviews). All code contributions must come with Documentation. At a bare minimum, this should include Technical Documentation covering all configuration options and/or setup. See Documentation Contributions below for more details.

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