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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
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 WAIWCAG 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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