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Core Committers

The Core Committers team is reviewed approximately annually, new members are added based on quality contributions to SilverStipe code and outstanding community participation.

Core Committer team

House rules for the Core Committer team

The "Core Committers" consist of everybody with write permissions to our codebase. With great power comes great responsibility, so we have agreed on certain expectations:

  • Be friendly, encouraging and constructive towards other community members
  • Frequently review pull requests and new issues (in particular, respond quickly to @mentions)
  • Treat issues according to our issue guidelines
  • Don't commit directly to core, raise pull requests instead (except trivial fixes)
  • Only merge code you have tested and fully understand. If in doubt, ask for a second opinion.
  • Ensure contributions have appropriate test coverage, are documented, and pass our coding conventions
  • Keep the codebase "releasable" at all times (check our release process)
  • Follow Semantic Versioning by putting any changes into the correct branch
  • API changes and non-trivial features should not be merged into release branches.
  • API changes on master should not be merged until they have the buy-in of at least two Core Committers (or better, through the core mailing list)
  • Be inclusive. Ensure a wide range of SilverStripe developers can obtain an understanding of your code and docs, and you're not the only one who can maintain it.
  • Avoid git push --force, and be careful with your git remotes (no accidental pushes)
  • Use your own forks to create feature branches
  • We release using the standard process. See the Making a SilverStripe Core Release

Contributing Committers

Beyond the group of Core Committers, there can be individuals which focus on core development work - typically sponsored through full-time product development roles by SilverStripe Ltd. These Contributing Committers require write access to core repositories to maintain their pace, often working alongside Core Committers. They are guided by additional rules:

  • Contributing Committers have write access to core repositories in order to work effectively with Github issues. They are expected to use those permissions with good judgement regarding merges of pull requests.
  • Complex or impactful changes need to be reviewed and approved by one or more Core Committers. This includes any additions, removals or changes to commonly used APIs. If that's not possible in the team, ping @silverstripe/core-team to get other Core Committers involved.
  • For these complex or impactful changes, Core Committers should be given 1-2 working days to review. Ideally at this point, the API has already been agreed on through issue comments outlining the planned work (see RFC Process.
  • More straightforward changes (e.g. documentation, styling) or areas which require quite specialised expertise (e.g. React) that's less available through most Core Committers can be approved or merged by team members who aren't Core Committers
  • Self-merges should be avoided, but are preferable to having work go stale or forcing other team members to waste time by context switching into a complex review (e.g. because the original reviewer went on leave). Any self-merge should be accompanied by a comment why this couldn't be handled in another way, and a (preferably written) approval from another team member.

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