Welcome to another post of the Digital Experience Accelerator (DXA) marathon, meant to explain how DXA works, what are the different ways to use it and how can you contribute to it.

Yesterday’s post talked about the configuration of the Content Manager and the authorization model used in DXA. 

Today I would like to share with you a document put together by SDL with the coding standards/ guiding principles for writing quality code for DXA. Standard guidelines for code development are critical for having a successful and high quality solution. Coding conventions serve the following purposes:

• They create a consistent look to the code, so that readers can focus on content, not layout.
• They enable readers to understand the code more quickly by making assumptions based on previous experience.
• They facilitate copying, changing, and maintaining the code.
• They demonstrate C# best practices.

We are often requested by our customers to provide them with best practices/ guidelines in developing high maintainable code. I am happy to say that for the development of DXA we put together a set of guidelines (for .NET) and they are attached to this post. The Java guidelines are being worked at this moment and will be uploaded to this post once they finished.

We hope you will apply these guidelines in your development and create a great code base that can be shared between projects, organization and the community.

Note; the Digital Experience Accelerator is an open source project that is hosted on SDL GitHub account

• DXA application .NET;
  https://github.com/sdl/dxa-web-application-dotnet/
• DXA application Java;
  https://github.com/sdl/dxa-web-application-java/
• DXA modules .NET & Java;
  https://github.com/sdl/dxa-modules/

On these repositories you can flag bugs, request changes and enhancements and also contribute by creating “pull requests” for bug fixes or features.

A pull request are changes you make in the code base, that will be reviewed, discussed and even push follow-up commits by DXA team.

Sharing your module(s) with the DXA community is a great gesture for the effort we all do in making DXA a great success. Uploading your module you can be done on the community site or creating a simple post talking about your module stored on GitHub. If you want please send me a tweet or email, mentioned below, with what you build. Curious what you thought of and what you build.

Besides contributing with code development you can also ask and answer questions on TREX, (http://tridion.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/dxa). More and more questions are being asked, so visit it after your lunch or right before you go home. There are always lost souls that need saving ;)

Today’s post is a bit shorter, it’s Friday so time for drinks. The Implementation guidelines are attached, if you have feedback or have a suggestion feel free to send me a tweet (@jarnohenneman) or mail (jhenneman-at-sdl-com).

As always thank you for reading and hope to see you tomorrow for another DXA post [:$]