Thursday, January 5, 2012

On the Twelfth Day of PhoneGapping: User Contributions

Did you know if there is a missing bit of functionality in PhoneGap you don't need to wait for the core development team to get around to it? You can take matters into your own hands since PhoneGap is an open source project.

Let's say you have a bit of functionality that is only required on one platform, well the best thing to do in that case is to write a plugin. If you want to share your plugin with the world then let us know by submitting a pull request on the PhoneGap Plugins repository. Submitting to this repository only requires for you to have a GitHub account. There is no need to sign any contributor license agreement. We love to get new plugins.

However, let's say you've identified an area of the API that is lacking. Until PhoneGap 1.3.0 there was no download function for the FileTransfer class. Well developer Alexander Heinrich decided to fill that niche by submitting pull requests that added the functionality to iOS and Android. That was a huge help and the BB developers were able to step in an fill in the functionality in their repository. Up until that point Alexander was not a member of the core PhoneGap developers but after he signed the Apache ICLA and we reviewed his code he was in. It's as simple as that.

So to all of you my challenge is for you to be the next Alexander Heinrich! Create a plugin, fix a bug add new functionality.

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