The very first question to ask yourself before reading this page is this:

Why contribute?

As is with any open source project, Open Auto Classifieds is always looking for developers, writers and others willing to lend a hand. There are any number of things to work on!

As this is open-source software, you are not legally obligated to give anything back to the community. In such a sense, Open Auto Classifieds is a gift to you, and you can run away and never be heard from again.

I hope, however, that this lack of a legal obligation doesn't prevent you from contributing back to this project. Many hours have been poured into this project, and certainly, this project has saved many hours of your time. If Open Auto Classifieds saved you 200 hours of work (the actual figure might be more, might be less), even if you contribute only ten hours back to the project, you still come out ahead 190 hours.

Additionally, your use of this script also requires investment on your part as well. You were required to learn the ins and outs, read the documentation, tweak things so that they worked just right, et cetera. Contributing back means making good use of your investment: it means not only will your expertise and knowledge be fed back into Open Auto Classifieds, but you might learn a thing or to from the internals that you didn't know before.

If your convinced, read on!

Contributions can come in many forms. Documentation, code, even evangelism, can all help a project. One of the things we've noticed, however, is that many contributions come from people helping themselves. They have a need, a special requirement, and they help the project out in that area.

What might that itch be? You might have an idea for a new Feature, or maybe would like to make an old feature better, you might be a great writer, you might have many numerous ideas. Do something that interests you.

I wanted to give a little credit to the other authors of Open Source scripts that have helped me by offering their code which I have used in Open Auto Classifieds. They are contributors whether they know it or not.

Jon Roig – The original author of Open Auto Classifieds, without Jon's script I would have never wanted to keep it going in the first place. http://jonroig.com/

Micah Carrick – The author of the Zip Code Class that I use. He has some other MySQL classes and a few other projects to look at. http://www.micahcarrick.com/04-19-2005/php-zip-code-range-and-distance-calculation.html

Christophe Beyls – The author of Slimbox a lightweight Lightbox clone licensed under the MIT license http://www.digitalia.be/software/slimbox/

Simon Jarvis – The author of the original Captcha code that is used for the contact us page http://www.white-hat-web-design.co.uk/articles/php-captcha.php

Monte Ohrt and The Smarty template engine team – What can I say I use it for the very base of OAC http://www.phpinsider.com/

Ray Larabie – I use the monofont for the captcha image http://www.larabiefonts.com

All of the forum members who have contributed and the many people who have given suggestions.

[leowmjw] [Mike Pryslak] [sentry] [raymor] [sammy95] [partsnthings]

And anyone else that I missed Thanks a ton.