Give back to the community by making Symphony more awesome.
The core philosophy of Symphony's development is to keep the core simple and to keep the systems it uses discrete. This is why all but the basic functionality—the design pattern that makes Symphony distinct from another CMS—resides in extensions, and why so few extensions are bundled with the core. Installing and maintaining extensions is an easy way to make your Symphony build powerful while keeping it flexible.
Developing new extensions, or maintaining and improving existing ones, is a great way to begin contributing to the Symphony community if you're not ready, or interested, in working on the core. You'll get a better idea of how Symphony is structured, how it works, and you'll make connections with other Symphony users.
Someone else might have built an extension that already serves your needs. Check SymphonyExtensions.com or the [download section][download] of the website, or ask around in the forums. Even if you can't find an extension that matches your exact use case, you might find one you can fork and use as a template for your extension. Or, if you find an unmaintained or abandoned extension, you could take it over and improve it rather than starting from scratch.
Once you've determined that you want to build a new extension, start by determining how your extension is going to accomplish its goal. That is:
We have a tutorial on developing extensions that walks you through how to create a simple extension from scratch. You should also look at the source code of other extensions out there, particularly those that are similar to what yours will do.
Make sure your extension has a valid extension.meta.xml file, as per the Symphony Extension Metadata Schema. This will let Symphony and other APIs automatically load information about your extension. You need this even if you don't plan on publishing your extension. Make sure you note:
For humans, you'll want to make sure there is a README file with equivalent information.
You should also choose a license for your extension. Symphony uses the MIT License, so we recommend that—plus, it's short and easy to add. You can even just copy it from Symphony and change the copyright information at the top. However, you are not required to use this license—but you should make it clear what license your code is under, so others are aware of how they can make changes.
So you built an extension! Congratulations. Sometimes you'll only need an extension for a very narrow case, so maybe others won't find much use in it. However, if you think you're ready to make your extension public, here's the best way you can share:
master branch should always represent a "stable" build of the extension. You may or may not want to maintain a public integration branch for ongoing development, though it's recommended.While you certainly don't have to use Git and GitHub, this is where ongoing Symphony development discussions happen, so it is the best way to integrate with the community and stay in the loop.