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The heart of the Xibo platform is open source software and always will be. If you benefit from Xibo and want to contribute to our project, you're very welcome to do so. There are lots of different ways to be helpful no matter what you're technical knowledge.

Be active in the community

It sounds like a simple thing, but one of the most helpful things an experienced user of Xibo can do is to be active in the community. Xibo is lucky enough to attract a huge variety of different users with different abilities, and the community is always busy with questions and requests for advice. Why not checkout our hall of fame, and then tell us how you use Xibo.

Report bugs

If you are sure something doesn't work the way it should, or the way it's documented to work, then opening a topic in the Get Help section of the Community forum with step-by-step instructions for reproducing the issue, is super helpful. One of our support team can pick that up and pass it directly to the development team to be fixed in the next release.

Suggest a feature or improvement

Xibo thrives on suggestions - much of the software does what it does because of our users describing how they want Xibo to work. If you have an idea for a new feature, or an improvement to something existing, open a topic in the Feature Requests category of the Community forum.

A member of the support team will likely want to discuss that with you and find out a bit more (there is nothing worse than adding a feature which turns out to be not quite what you meant!), but once it's all understood they will pass it to the development team to be introduced in an appropriate release.

Write some code

If you're more technical and fancy getting involved in some software development, then that is great!

Integrate or extend

Xibo has extensive options for integration and extension, whether that be using the API to connect with 3rd parties, making exciting new widgets, or extending the software with custom code. Find out more in our developer documentation.

Contribute to the core code

There are a few things you should know before you dive in - but the main thing is to make sure what you want to do is something we can include, and when we can include it.

There are 3 main applications which we need help with - these are (all links go to the GitHub repository for that application):

All development is on GitHub in the xibosignage organization. Xibo contains multiple components which are organised into their own repositories, we also have a central repository for collecting issues. This can be found here.

We'd love to work with you and accept your contributions. For small changes like bug fixes, typos, etc. Please fork us and submit a pull request with the details of what you have changed.

For larger changes, please make sure you are happy to electronically sign a Contributor Licence Agreement before starting.

Fixing a Bug

  1. If the bug doesn't already exist in GitHub, open a Topic in the Get Help section of the Community forum.
  2. Discuss with a member of the staff group to confirm the bug
  3. Once the bug is clearly understood the staff member will open a GitHub Issue tagged as a bug. They will target the issue to a release milestone.
  4. Fork the appropriate component(s), branch either develop (next release) or master (next bug fix release)
  5. Implement the work, referencing the issue in your commit (xibosignage/xibo#XXX)
  6. Create a Pull Request into either the develop or master branch as appropriate
  7. Discuss, adjust and merge

Implementing a Feature

  1. If the feature doesn't already exist in GitHub, open a Topic in the Feature Requests category of the Community forum.
  2. Discuss with a member of the staff group to confirm the feature and provide direction on how to implement it
  3. The staff member will open a GitHub Issue tagged as an enhancement. They will target the issue to the next development release milestone.
  4. Fork the appropriate component(s), branch develop (next release)
  5. Implement the work, referencing the issue in your commit (xibosignage/xibo#XXX)
  6. Create a Pull Request into develop
  7. Discuss, adjust and merge

Release Cycle

Xibo actively works on two releases at any one time - the stable release and the development release. The stable release is in the master branch, and the development release is in the develop branch. It is always best to ask the best place to put your code before you start, as sometimes there can be framework changes between major releases.

Contributor Licence Agreement (CLA)

So that we can be confident in the future of the project, any significant contribution requires a CLA (contributor licence agreement) to be reviewed and signed here.

Signing the CLA is easy and hopefully painless.

  1. Read the CLA.
  2. Make an account on GitHub if you don't have one already.
  3. File a pull request for this project.
  4. Email us.
  5. Wait for us to merge your pull request.

Filing the Pull Request

GitHub has documentation to help you file a pull request.

Your pull request should be the addition of a single file to the contributors folder. The name of the file should be your GitHub userid, with .md appended to the end. For example, the user dasgarner would create the file dasgarner.md in the contributors folder - this would result in the following full path: contribitors/dasgarner.md.

The file must contain the following:

[date]

I hereby agree to the terms of the Contributors License
Agreement, version 1.0, with MD5 checksum
e0de59b14f4c8a5d54ae9e75b182bd95.

I furthermore declare that I am authorized and able to make this
agreement and sign this declaration.

Signed,

[your name]
https://github.com/[your github userid]

Replace the bracketed text as follows:

  • [date] with today's date, in the unambiguous numeric form YYYY-MM-DD.
  • [your name] with your name.
  • [your github userid] with your GitHub userid.

You can confirm the MD5 checksum of the CLA by running the md5 program over cla-1.0.md:

md5sum cla-1.0.md
MD5 (cla-1.0.md) = e0de59b14f4c8a5d54ae9e75b182bd95

If the output is different from above, do not sign the CLA and let us know.

Sending the Email

Email us at info@xibo.org.uk, with the subject "CLA" and the following body:

I submitted a pull request to indicate agreement to the terms
of the Contributors License Agreement.

Signed,

[your name]
https://github.com/[your github userid]
[your address]
[your phone number]

Replace the bracketed text as follows:

  • [your name] with your name.
  • [your github userid] with your GitHub userid.
  • [your address] with a physical mailing address at which you can be contacted.
  • [your phone number] with a phone number at which you can be contacted.

You've refused my contribution!

We are always very sorry when your idea or contribution doesn't fit with the project. There are lots of things we have to take into consideration before including something. Xibo has a lot of existing users we need to consider. We don't want to be strict gatekeepers, but we have a duty to our existing users to make sure that changes to the software make sense.

Don't worry though, you can still have your feature in your Xibo! We have built Xibo with an extensive set of tools to extend with custom additions and modifications. Xibo also has a comprehensive API.

Find out more in our developer documentation.