TurboGears builds on other open source projects and that is a benefit to everyone involved. TurboGears helps its users through:
- Integration - making the included packages work seamlessly and naturally together
- Documentation - providing a consolidated view of all of the projects and creating new documentation as needed
- Improvements working with the included projects’ maintainers to include improvements directly in those projects.
This is an obvious goal: make all of the pieces work well together. None of the included projects knows about the others, which is generally a good thing when you follow the Model-View-Controller pattern. In TurboGears, your CherryPy controllers sit at the hub of your project. This is the biggest area for integration. Providing tools that allow the controllers to more easily work with SQLObject databases, answer asynchronous calls from MochiKit and render out completed Kid templates is where the big win will come.
One other place for integration is in standalone tools: tg-admin commands can help a user create, update and deploy complete TurboGears applications.
If it isn’t documented, it doesn’t exist is a good rule of thumb. This is not to say that patches will not be accepted without documentation: send the patches in, by all means! If the feature is good and valuable, someone will document it. However, until the feature is documented, it will not be listed as a feature of TurboGears.
Providing good docstrings that epydoc can pull out can go a good portion of the distance.
The projects included with TurboGears have varying quantities and qualities of documentation. Helping improve the documentation of the other projects will help everyone as well.
Contributing improvements back to projects used by TurboGears is a core need for TurboGears’ own growth. MochiKit, Kid, CherryPy and SQLObject are all used by a wide variety of people in contexts other than TurboGears. This is a great advantage over an all-in-one framework, because the community, in aggregate, is that much larger. There are more eyes looking at the code and more ideas flowing in to each part.
Wherever possible, code that is not specific to integration between multiple projects within TurboGears should be submitted back to the original project for use.