Over the past year and a half, as more people and organizations have been trying out and adopting Evergreen, unofficial scripts and additions to the projects have been offered to the Evergreen community. Sometimes these scripts have just been posted to the mailing list (Travis Schafer's C source code for importing data), sometimes they have been maintained in a wiki page (John Schmidt's installer script), and sometimes they have been made available via the open-ils.org download page (my import holdings demo package).

In the interest of providing a central location for all of these contributions to Evergreen, with the hopes of easing collaboration and increasing reuse of the community efforts, we have created a new Subversion repository with a new Trac instance at http://svn.open-ils.org/trac/ILS-Contrib

There are no projects in the ILS-Contrib repository yet. The basic process for adding a project goes something like this:

  * Propose your project on the open-ils-dev mailing list (name, purpose, pointer to existing code if you have it, which GPL-compatible license your project will use)

  * If at least one other person on the mailing list expresses support for your project, you will be given a Subversion and Trac account so that you can maintain your code in the ILS-Contrib repository, maintain a project page in the Trac wiki, and manage Trac tickets

I plan to propose the "import holdings demo" package in a few minutes, and hopefully it will be approved so that we can use it as a template for other projects. I hope Travis and John will also bring their projects forward so that we can start building a nice center of gravity for the Evergreen community.

Aside: we are also putting together an OpenSRF Contributions repository, and will announce that shortly for projects that want to build on top of OpenSRF without Evergreen. Stay tuned!

We also hope that ILS-Contrib can serve as an incubator for projects that might eventually be brought into core. Some projects, such as the import holdings demo, will always live outside of the Evergreen core. However, significant Evergreen extensions (as a purely hypothetical example, adding user tags / comments / reviews / ratings / recommendation engine to the OPAC) might develop in ILS-Contrib but eventually be merged into core once the project matures.