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How To Become ERP5 Developer (Outdated)

How To showing how to become an ERP5 developer (outdated)
  • Last Update:2016-03-18
  • Version:002
  • Language:en

This tutorial is outdaded

This tutorial is oudated and it is maintained for historical reasons. We recommend you use Forum Learn Track:

http://www.erp5.com/developer-Learning.Track.Forum

Table of Contents

The goal of this document is to permit to the reader to be able to contribute to ERP5 as a developer. This page will not explain how to do, but point out interesting links that does. To contribute to ERP5, you should have some basic computer skills, including programming, and of course speak english.

"ERP5 is a free Enterprise Resource Planning system based on the Zope application server. It is mainly developed in the Python programming language and the source code is freely available under the GNU General Public License." - wikipedia
So the first things to learn, are python and zope.

Learn python

If you have no skills in programming, so have to begin with something very simple like http://openbookproject.net/thinkCSpy and after this read Dive Into Python : http://diveintopython.net/. But if you are not totally beginer, just begin with Dive Into Python.
Depending of your initial level, this part can take from one day (revisions), to 1 week (never use python).

Learn zope

The most important documentation to read is the Zope Book : http://docs.zope.org/zope2/zope2book/. But all is not required to develop ERP5, some parts are useless.
The important parts are :

The next step is to read the Zope Developer's Guide (http://docs.zope.org/zope2/zdgbook/). But for this documentation, it's probably better to go search in when you wan't to learn something than read all without understanding nothing.

Develop a first ERP5 application

There is a good presentation about this : http://www.erp5.com/developer-Forum.Tutorial.

To make this HowTo, you need an ERP5 instance to be installed (you should already have this from the zope part. If not, go to http://www.erp5.org/DownloadRpm to install it).

ERP5 good practices

A comunity is working on ERP5 from many countries. So keep in mind that your code will be reviewed by other developers who do not necessarily speak the same language as you. There are rules to follow for working with the community to be nice :

Keep informed about ERP5 development

There is a web site for the community : http://www.erp5.org/ (with some wiki and documentation). You can also suscribe to some mailling list that will keep you informed of the developement, currents problems, new features, ... The list of the available mailing lists are there : http://mail.nexedi.com/mailman/listinfo
Some are useless for you, the most interesting ones are :

  1. ERP5 Report mailing list
    The erp5-report mailing list keeps you informed about the latest developments related to ERP5 through automatically generated reports. Currently, this list is used to post svn activities and the results of automatic unit testing.
  2. ERP5 Users mailing list
    The erp5-users mailing list is intended for users of ERP5 interested in sharing their experience. It is the right place to ask questions about installation, setup, features, configuration, etc.
  3. ERP5 Developers mailing list
    The erp5-dev mailing list is intended for developers of ERP5. It is the right place to share technical information about ERP5's core architecture or to discuss new features added to the SVN branches.

Report and fix bugs

Related Articles

We are using a bug module powered by erp5 for bugs to handle. It's located at http://erp5.nexedi.com/bug_module. Currently, a VPN key from Nexedi is needed to access it (this will change soon and bug tracker will be public);