[[PageOutline(2-5,Contents,pullout)]] = Plugin Development Guide This document captures some best practices and guidelines for plugin development. It is a community driven document, and everyone is encouraged to contribute to it. If you have questions or comments, please raise them on the [trac:MailingList]. == License Plugin authors are encouraged to clearly indicate how the contribution is licensed. This is important for both users and future !developers of your plugin. Having a clearly defined license allows someone else to adopt and carry on development of the plugin if you choose to no longer support it. It is also important for users and administrators who need to understand the terms and conditions under which they can use or modify the code. Trac-Hacks is an open source community driven by voluntary contributions and made successful by collaboration. Therefore we encourage the use of licenses that foster collaboration and minimal restrictions on future use of the code. Trac has adopted the [trac:TracLicense BSD 3-Clause license], and use of the same license in any plugin code is encouraged. One of the many benefits to adopting this license is that any plugin code can potentially be integrated into the Trac core down the road. The following steps are suggested: 1. Add the `license` keyword in `setup.py` ([browser:/plantumlmacro/trunk/setup.py@11477:22 example]). 1. Add a license header to every Python source file ([browser:/plantumlmacro/trunk/plantuml/macro.py@11477:1-9 example]). {{{#!python # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- # # Copyright (C) your name here # All rights reserved. # # This software is licensed as described in the file COPYING, which # you should have received as part of this distribution. }}} 1. Add a license header to every HTML template (example: TBD). {{{#!text/html }}} The use of the XML comment marker as shown is important so that the text does not get rendered to the output. Make sure not to use the alternate form, which is rendered to the output as a hidden comment: `` 1. Add a `COPYING` file with the license text in the top-level directory of the project ([browser:/plantumlmacro/trunk/COPYING example]). 1. Add an appropriate tag to the wiki page: [tag:bsd-license], [tag:apache-license], [tag:gpl-license], [tag:lgpl-license], [tag:mit-license]. Additional tags can be created for additional or more descriptive license types Currently it is not recommended to add license text to static resources (i.e. file in `htdocs`), since doing so will increase the size of the content that is sent to the client. This issue will be addressed in the Trac core when support is added for minimization (trac:#10672). == Coding Style Authors are encouraged to conform to the [trac:TracDev/CodingStyle Trac Style Guide] and [http://legacy.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/ PEP-0008 style guide].