VirtueMart

h1. A note to new Developers

Once you have been included in the development team you can then select an open task/bug/whatever from our developer portal. When you have selected something you would like to work on you will need to assign yourself to that item. If you do not have access yet one of the development leaders can do that for you.

Once you have code that is ready to commit to SVN please contact one of the development leaders. We will evaluate your code and commit it.  After this you will be granted commit rights to the SVN directly. I am sure all of you can understand the need for us to have a look at your first commit offer.

Guides how to start:

* Please start with the [[Developer guideline]].

* Take a look at our forum. Help other users, provide test and bug reports and provide patches, fixes and solutions. We will fast recognise this and give you higher ranking. 

* When you find a task the suits to you, just write a message and you may start with it at once.

Here is a guide which base features every page should follow: [[Best practices]]

This will help us develop pages that work and act consistantly.

When you are registered to redmine, you *maybe kicked if you are not active for longer time than 3 months*. Of course you can get *easily listed again*, we just need a better overview of the currenct active people.

h1. Why we use skype as main communication system?

Polemic said, email is an electronic communication form of the last century. But there are also of course some serious reasons:

Skype is better, because email has the following disadvantages compared to skype:

* file size is limited and the limited is for everyone different and most time unknown

* man in the middle attack is easy

* usually emails use no encryption (yes we could, but who does it?)

* important emails are sometimes sort out as spam

* Rereading a conversation after a while is hard, except we quote always, what we do most time, which leads to the next 

* emails create redundant information. Due the missing thread feature per person/channel, we quote always the answer. Additionally to that most attachments are stored twice, in the email as attachmen and opened on the disk. Of course you can split the attachment from the email, but then you have later no information that there was an attachment at the mail, nor where you stored the file.

* emails need a lot more clicks to accept an attachment.

* sometimes our server has an hickup for some hours, increasing the chance that we just miss an email

In skype the chat window with any news is highlighted, downloading an attachment is just to accept, choose directory and store. The same as email you say? Almost. There are two cases, you chat with someone in skype, ticket system, forum, whatever, he sents you an email with attachment, means for me "open the email client", "search the message". Or the other way, somenone just sends an email with attachment. The problem persists, that email is full of spam, adverstisment, newsgroups stuff, unknown people writing offers, requests, demands, etc. So it can be easily overlooked, because the task "search the message" is not set (lol). So the biggest advantage for us in the core team is also that compared to email maybe only 1/1000 know our skype names