[DOCUMENTATION] Add CONTRIBUTING information for developers

Inspired both from GNU FM, postActiv and Moodle
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# Contributing to GNU social
First of all, if you're reading this intending to contribute to GNU social,
thanks! Free software development only happens when people like you take an
interest in giving back to the software they themselves use, and their
community.
When contributing to this repository, please first discuss the change you wish to
make via issue, email, or any other method with the owners of this repository before
making a change.
There's a few files you should read before going forward with a merge request
or a patch submission. They detail what this file touches on in brief. They
are:
* coding_standards.md: How your code should be structured and formatted to be
accepted into the GNU social codebase.
* merge_request_checklist.md: A quick checklist to review before submission.
## Merge Request Process
1. Ensure you strip any trailing spaces off and checked the file with php-cs-fixer
2. Increase the version numbers in any examples files and the README.md to the new version that this
Pull Request would represent. The versioning scheme we use is [SemVer](http://semver.org/).
3. You may merge the Pull Request in once you have the sign-off of two other developers, or if you
do not have permission to do that, you may request the second reviewer to merge it for you.
## Code of Conduct
### Our Pledge
In the interest of fostering an open and welcoming environment, we as
contributors and maintainers pledge to making participation in our project and
our community a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of age, body
size, disability, ethnicity, gender identity and expression, level of experience,
nationality, personal appearance, race, religion, or sexual identity and
orientation.
### Our Standards
Examples of behavior that contributes to creating a positive environment
include:
* Using welcoming and inclusive language
* Being respectful of differing viewpoints and experiences
* Gracefully accepting constructive criticism
* Focusing on what is best for the community
* Showing empathy towards other community members
Examples of unacceptable behavior by participants include:
* The use of sexualized language or imagery and unwelcome sexual attention or
advances
* Trolling, insulting/derogatory comments, and personal or political attacks
* Public or private harassment
* Publishing others' private information, such as a physical or electronic
address, without explicit permission
* Other conduct which could reasonably be considered inappropriate in a
professional setting
### Our Responsibilities
Project maintainers are responsible for clarifying the standards of acceptable
behavior and are expected to take appropriate and fair corrective action in
response to any instances of unacceptable behavior.
Project maintainers have the right and responsibility to remove, edit, or
reject comments, commits, code, wiki edits, issues, and other contributions
that are not aligned to this Code of Conduct, or to ban temporarily or
permanently any contributor for other behaviors that they deem inappropriate,
threatening, offensive, or harmful.
### Scope
This Code of Conduct applies both within project spaces and in public spaces
when an individual is representing the project or its community. Examples of
representing a project or community include using an official project e-mail
address, posting via an official social media account, or acting as an appointed
representative at an online or offline event. Representation of a project may be
further defined and clarified by project maintainers.
### Enforcement
Instances of abusive, harassing, or otherwise unacceptable behavior may be
reported by contacting the project team at [INSERT EMAIL ADDRESS]. All
complaints will be reviewed and investigated and will result in a response that
is deemed necessary and appropriate to the circumstances. The project team is
obligated to maintain confidentiality with regard to the reporter of an incident.
Further details of specific enforcement policies may be posted separately.
Project maintainers who do not follow or enforce the Code of Conduct in good
faith may face temporary or permanent repercussions as determined by other
members of the project's leadership.
### Attribution
This Code of Conduct is adapted from the [Contributor Covenant][homepage], version 1.4,
available at [http://contributor-covenant.org/version/1/4][version]
[homepage]: http://contributor-covenant.org
[version]: http://contributor-covenant.org/version/1/4/
## The Code of Conflict
GNU social has a high submission standard and we want to keep quality code in the
codebase and bad code out of it. As such your code will be closely scrutinized,
and you might take this criticism personally. Please understand that this is
meant to keep the standards of the codebase up, and isn't meant personally. All
the same, this isn't an excuse for poor behaviour, and a reviewer shouldn't be
misbehaving towards submitters. The Code of Conflict outlines the dispute
resolution mechanism if something does come up, so give it a read.
## Coding Standards
Since we will be expected to maintain your code once it's submitted, we ask you
to adhere to certain coding standards that make it easier for us to do so. If
code doesn't follow them, it will be rejected, so please read up on these.
## Bug Reports
Please report bugs to the issue tracker at
<https://notabug.org/diogo/gnu-social/issues> Avoid assigning the labels
yourself, as these are for the development team to assign priority and area of
coverage to a subject. Please only submit something here if you are certain it
is a bug or represents a feature enhancement that we do not presently have. If
you are uncertain whether it's a bug, please feel free to ask
at #social IRC channel on freenode.net https://www.freenode.net/.
When reporting a bug, please try to include as much information as possible,
including the environment being run on (if it's a common LAMP stack just give
us version numbers of the main stack components, that's fine), and the specific
error you get. If you do not get a client-facing error, please check the PHP
error_log and ensure there isn't something silently reported there, as well as
the GNU social log. Try to include steps to reproduce the error as well, as if
we cannot reproduce the error, we can't fix it!
It is perfectly acceptable to reference the archive page of a discussion on the
mailing list for the bug report, by the way, as long as it includes all the
information we need for a bug report.
## Submitting Feature Requests / Enhancement Requests
Social media is constantly evolving, and we welcome ideas about how we can
change and evolve GNU social to keep it the excellent piece of software that it
is. However, there are a few things we ask you do when submitting feature
requests:
1. Understand that since we have a limited amount of developers and these people
contribute in their free time, we may prioritize things differently than you
value them. Oftentimes this is because certain requests involve less changes
to the existing codebase than others, and therefore this makes them easier
to add.
2. Please search the existing feature requests and enhancements to see if a
similar request exists. If one does but you have different ideas about how
to do it or what it should entail, please add a comment to the existing idea
rather than create a new one for your "version" of it. Duplicate submissions
mean we spend more time maintaining the tracker and less time actually
working on the codebase!
3. When outlining the way that you see something working, don't be afraid to be
as detailed as possible! We may not implement it exactly as you describe for
any variety of reasons, but the more concrete and fleshed out an idea is, the
easier it is for us to know what you want and be able to implement it in a
sane and secure fashion.
4. When describing a possible new idea and its mechanisms of operation, the key
words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD",
"SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in the issue submission
are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.
<https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2119>
Finally, and just as a call back to the first point, realize just because we
might not rush to implement something, doesn't mean that we don't want to
implement it! We would rather take the time to do something right the first
time, then hurriedly apply a new idea, or a fix, only to have to patch it later.
## Branch of Code Submissions
Unless you've been specifically directed otherwise, all submissions of code
should be against the `nightly` branch, so make sure any modifications are based
on Nightly.
## Copyright / Licensing
You acknowledge that by submitting code to GNU social, you are licensing it under
the GNU AGPLv3 unless there is an extenuating circumstance where it would be
licensed differently (such as modifications to an external library we include
such as Stomp).
You also acknowledge that unless you assign a copyright explicitly, it will be
assumed to be assigned to GNU social.
Thanks for considering submission, and happy hacking!

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<?php
// This file is part of GNU social - https://www.gnu.org/software/social
//
// GNU social is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
// it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by
// the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
// (at your option) any later version.
//
// GNU social is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
// but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
// MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
// GNU Affero General Public License for more details.
//
// You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License
// along with GNU social. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
/**
* Description of this file.
*
* @package samples
* @author Diogo Cordeiro <diogo@fc.up.pt>
* @copyright 2019 Free Software Foundation, Inc http://www.fsf.org
* @license https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.html GNU AGPL v3 or later
*/
namespace samples;
defined('GNUSOCIAL') || die();
require_once(__DIR__ . DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . 'SampleHandler.php');
/**
* Description of this class.
*
* @copyright 2019 Free Software Foundation, Inc http://www.fsf.org
* @license https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.html GNU AGPL v3 or later
*/
class MySampleClass
{
/**
* Constructor for the sample class.
*
* @param string $dummy_word just because.
* @param int $result another just because.
*/
public function __construct(string $dummy_word = '', int $result = null)
{
global $demo;
$this->niceWorld();
}
/**
* How cool is this function.
*
* @return string
*/
public function niceWorld() : string
{
return 'hello, world.';
}
}

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GNU social Coding Style
===========================
Please comply with [PSR-2](https://www.php-fig.org/psr/psr-2/) and the following standard when working on GNU social
if you want your patches accepted and modules included in supported releases.
If you see code which doesn't comply with the below, please fix it :)
Strings
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Use `'` instead of `"` for strings, where substitutions aren't required.
This is a performance issue, and prevents a lot of inconsistent coding styles.
When using substitutions, use curly braces around your variables - like so:
$var = "my_var: {$my_var}";
Comments and Documentation
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Comments go on the line ABOVE the code, NOT to the right of the code, unless it is very short.
All functions and methods are to be documented using PhpDocumentor - https://docs.phpdoc.org/guides/
File Headers
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
File headers follow a consistent format, as such:
// This file is part of GNU social - https://www.gnu.org/software/social
//
// GNU social is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
// it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by
// the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
// (at your option) any later version.
//
// GNU social is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
// but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
// MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
// GNU Affero General Public License for more details.
//
// You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License
// along with GNU social. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
/**
* Description of this file.
*
* @package samples
* @author Diogo Cordeiro <diogo@fc.up.pt>
* @copyright 2019 Free Software Foundation, Inc http://www.fsf.org
* @license https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.html GNU AGPL v3 or later
*/
Please use it.
A few notes:
* The description of the file doesn't have to be exhaustive. Rather it's
meant to be a short summary of what's in this file and what it does. Try
to keep it to 1-5 lines. You can get more in-depth when documenting
individual functions!
* You'll probably see files with multiple authors, this is by
design - many people contributed to GNU social or its forebears! If you
are modifying an existing file, APPEND your own author line, and update
the copyright year if needed. Do not replace existing ones.
You may find `boilerplate.php` useful when creating a new file from scratch.
Paragraph spacing
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Where-ever possible, try to keep the lines to 80 characters. Don't
sacrifice readability for it though - if it makes more sense to have it in
one longer line, and it's more easily read that way, that's fine.
With assignments, avoid breaking them down into multiple lines unless
neccesary, except for enumerations and arrays.
'If' statements format
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Use switch statements where many else if's are going to be used. Switch/case is faster
if ($var == 'example') {
echo 'This is only an example';
} else {
echo 'This is not a test. This is the real thing';
}
Do NOT make if statements like this:
if ($var == 'example'){ echo 'An example'; }
OR this
if($var = 'example')
echo "An {$var}";
Associative arrays
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Always use `[]` instead of `array()`. Associative arrays must be written in the
following manner:
$array = [
'var' => 'value',
'var2' => 'value2'
];
Note that spaces are preferred around the '=>'.
A note about shorthands
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some short hands are evil:
- Use the long format for `<?php`. Do NOT use `<?`.
- Use the long format for `<?php` echo. Do NOT use `<?=`.
Naming conventions
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Respect PSR2 first.
- Classes use PascalCase (e.g. MyClass).
- Functions/Methods use camelCase (e.g. myFunction).
- Variables use snake_case (e.g. my_variable).
A note on variable names, etc. It must be possible to understand what is meant
without neccesarialy seeing it in context, because the code that calls something
might not always make it clear.
So if you have something like:
$notice->post($contents);
Well I can easily tell what you're doing there because the names are straight-
forward and clear.
Something like this:
foo->bar();
Is much less clear.
Also, whereever possible, avoid ambiguous terms. For example, don't use text
as a term for a variable. Call back to "contents" above.
Comparisons
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Always use symbol based comparison operators (&&, ||) instead of text based
operators (AND, OR) as they are evaluated in different orders and at different
speeds. This is will prevent any confusion or strange results.
Use English
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
All variables, classes, methods, functions and comments must be in English.
Bad english is easier to work with than having to babelfish code to work out
how it works.
Encoding
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Files should be in UTF-8 encoding with UNIX line endings.
No ending tag
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Files should not end with an ending php tag "?>". Any whitespace after the
closing tag is sent to the browser and cause errors, so don't include them.
Nesting Functions
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Avoid, if at all possible. When not possible, document the living daylights
out of why you're nesting it. It's not always avoidable, but PHP 5 has a lot
of obscure problems that come up with using nested functions.
If you must use a nested function, be sure to have robust error-handling.
This is a must and submissions including nested functions that do not have
robust error handling will be rejected and you'll be asked to add it.
Scoping
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Properly enforcing scope of functions is something many PHP programmers don't
do, but should.
In general:
* Variables unique to a class should be protected and use interfacing to
change them. This allows for input validation and making sure we don't have
injection, especially when something's exposed to the API, that any program
can use, and not all of them are going to be be safe and trusted.
* Variables not unique to a class should be validated prior to every call,
which is why it's generally not a good idea to re-use stuff across classes
unless there's significant performance gains to doing so.
* Classes should protect functions that they do not want overriden, but they
should avoid protecting the constructor and destructor and related helper
functions as this prevents proper inheritance.
Typecasting
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PHP is a soft-typed language and it falls to us developers to make sure that
we are using the proper inputs. Where ever possible use explicit type casting.
Where it in't, you're going to have to make sure that you check all your
inputs before you pass them.
All outputs should be cast as an explicit PHP type.
Not properly typecasting is a shooting offence. Soft types let programmers
get away with a lot of lazy code, but lazy code is buggy code, and frankly, I
don't want it in GNU social if it's going to be buggy.
Consistent exception handling
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Consistency is key to good code to begin with, but it is especially important
to be consistent with how we handle errors. GNU social has a variety of built-
in exception classes. Use them, wherever it's possible and appropriate, and
they will do the heavy lifting for you.
Additionally, ensure you clean up any and all records and variables that need
cleanup in a function using try { } finally { } even if you do not plan on
catching exceptions (why wouldn't you, though? That's silly.)
If you do not call an exception handler, you must, at a minimum, record errors
to the log using common_log(level, message)
Ensure all possible control flows of a function have exception handling and
cleanup, where appropriate. Don't leave endpoints with unhandled exceptions.
Try not to leave something in an error state if it's avoidable.
Return values
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
All functions must return a value. Every single one. This is not optional.
If you are simply making a procedure call, for example as part of a helper
function, then return boolean TRUE on success, and the exception on failure.
When returning the exception, return the whole nine yards, which is to say the
actual PHP exception object, not just an error message.
All return values not the above should be type cast, and you should sanitize
anything returned to ensure it fits into the cast. You might technically make
an integer a string, for instance, but you should be making sure that integer
SHOULD be a string, if you're returning it, and that it is a valid return
value.
A vast majority of programming errors come down to not checking your inputs
and outputs properly, so please try to do so as best and thoroughly as you can.
Layout and Location of files
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
`/actions/` contains files that determine what happens when something "happens":
for instance, when someone favourites or repeats a notice. Code that is
related to a "happening" should go here.
`/classes/` contains abstract definitions of certain "things" in the codebase
such as a user or notice. If you're making a new "thing", it goes here.
`/lib/` is basically the back-end. Actions will call something in here to get
stuff done usually, which in turn will probably manipulate information stored
in one or more records represented by a class.
`/extlib/` is where external libraries are located. If you include a new
external library, it goes here.
`/plugins/` This is a great way to modularize your own new features. If you want
to create new core features for GNU social, it is probably best to create a
module unless you absolutely must override or modify the core behaviours.

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Submission Checklist
================================================================================
This document serves as a handy checklist for submitted merges and patches to
the postActiv project. Following it isn't a gaurantee a patch will be accepted,
but it will help you avoid common problems.
1. Ensure all code control paths in all functions return a value.
2. Ensure all exceptions are trapped in an exception class, or minimally,
written to the log with common_log
3. Ensure the coding format standards are adhered to (see coding_standards.md)
4. Ensure that any new class that deals in public data has a corresponding new
API endpoint.
5. Ensure that all new API endpoints sanitize inputs and outputs properly.
6. Ensure that your version of the code works with PHP 7 on a standard
LAMP and LEMP stack (Linux+Apache+MariaDB+PHP and Linux+nginx+MariaDB+PHP)
7. If implementing new database functions, ensure they work with MariaDB
and postgreSQL.
8. Ensure all data that federates does so properly and has mechanisms to
catch and accomodate for federation transmission failure.
9. Ensure that nothing is left in an error state when it is avoidable.
10. Ensure that all code submitted is properly documented.
11. Ensure that there are no PHP Strict Standards or Parse errors in the code.