Extending Controls and getting more involved?

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5/2/2008 6:21:44 AM
msimner
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Extending Controls and getting more involved?

Hi Joe,

I've been busily developing custom versions of some of the common controls (where required) and in order to take advantage of their functionality as a base class (rather than simply copy and paste the code) I've made certain items 'protected' rather than 'private' as currently.  A simple example of this is the ModuleTitleControl where I made the CanEdit property protected, as well as the literalExtraMarkup string. 

What's your general thoughts on these type of updates?  Would you rather people kept them to themselves, or potentially commit them to SVN for your approval (assuming they're generic, worthy, tested, non-breaking etc).  I don't want to keep plaguing you with ideas and minor changes if you'd really rather just retain your vision in the code and focus on the major functionality.

I have another local update as I found the collapseLinkButton couldn't 'collapse' a control that wasn't at the same hierarchy level.  My overall aim was to integrate the collapselinkbutton with the title control in order to collapse the module content (similar to DotNetNuke functionality :-) ) - but this needed an extra container to achieve the right layout.  I think this would be a useful feature to add to some of the more common modules (if state was also cached per-user), but it's not something I'm actively using right now.

I guess I'd just be interested in your thoughts on whether this sort of external development is a help or a hindrance!  I totally understand that opening things up to people who're new to the code can give you 'more' support headaches rather than less so I'm happy to retain my changes locally, but if you're willing i'd be more than interested in knowlng how you like to work with other contributors.

Cheers,

Matt

 

5/2/2008 7:40:27 AM
Joe Audette
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Re: Extending Controls and getting more involved?

Hi Matt,

I think you've hit the nail on the head in terms of understanding the issues I'm faced with in coordinating the efforts of others. In a perfect world I would take the time to work with as many people as I can who are interested in helping, but in the real world I have to be careful and not let this slow down my own development efforts and meeting my own goals. I'm in a particularly challenging phase right now because consulting work has been sporadic and I'm spending most of my time working for free on improving mojoportal and burning through my own savings. The end of the runway of my savings is probably around August unless I can figure out a way to get more revenue rolling in I may have to take a job (possibly unrelated to mojoportal) by then. So my top priorities at the moment are to get a few premium products for sale on top of the free stuff as well as to make the project more popular (hence my efforts on skinning).

So with that said, if you send me patches that I agree with I will  accept them gladly. If I don't agree with them or a lot of changes are needed before I can accept them then the required back and forth communication to get to an agreement can start to be a hindrance to my own efforts and in my current state of affairs I just can't afford the cycles.

The changes to the controls you propose sound fine, so if you'd like to send a patch I will review it.

In general its best to send me patches with limited scope rather than a bunch of wide ranging changes that touch a lot of files throughout various projects. So in this case if you send me a patch limited to control re-factoring thats probably fine as a good starting point. Make sure you are up to date against trunk using svn update before creating the patch. In this case, if your changes are limited to files in Web/Controls, you can right click that folder and choose TortoiseSVN > Create Patch, then send me the resulting file.

Best,

Joe

5/2/2008 8:05:58 AM
msimner
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Re: Extending Controls and getting more involved?

Many thanks Joe,

I'll give each local change I make considered thought as to its appropriateness for the base product.  Keeping changes small and manageable is also good advice - and obviously makes your job of reviewing easier.

I'll follow the patch process with any suggested changes as that's also a good way for me to keep track/backup of local changes regardless of whether they end up in the base code.

Matt

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