Coding Style and Standards

Projects under the SciELO Project scope have rigorous standards for both coding style, testing, and documentation.

You may notice there are lots of legacy projects that don`t follow the presented standards. Yes, it is a tragedy but we are fixing them little by little.

Documentation Styling

Every project needs to have documentation built with sphinx. This will allow us to easily integrate it with all the other docs.

For more information, see:

Documentation Coverage

If you fix a bug, and the bug requires an API or behavior modification, all documentation in the package which references that API or behavior must change to reflect the bug fix, ideally in the same commit that fixes the bug or adds the feature.

Change Log

Feature additions and bugfixes must be added to the CHANGES.txt file in the prevailing style. Changelog entries should be long and descriptive, not cryptic. Other developers should be able to know what your changelog entry means.

Coding Style

Currently we only support codes written in PHP5.2 or latest, and Python 2.6 or latest. All codes should follow it’s respective style-guide. Recent projects tend to be developed with Python using Google Styleguide as a base for coding standards. Indentation on template files are defined as 2 spaces, in order to prevent excessive depth.