In order to make BaseElements the best DDR import tool available, we’ve written our own plugin. There are a couple of reasons for this. First we wanted to keep it simple for end users, and have a single plugin that does file functions as well as dialogs. Plus after much wrangling I found that the fastest import times were when importing csv. So we also needed an external XSLT engine that could process from XML to csv outside of FMP.
So BaseElements 3 now includes the BaseElements.fmx or BaseElements.fmplugin plugin.
Potentially we could onsell this to other developers (the file and dialog stuff is old hat, plenty of plugins do that, but the XSLT stuff is new), but I thought it would be best to try something different and open source it instead.
The nature of FMP means I haven’t worked much in the development of open source products. I’ve used a lot of them myself, but never coded for one or worked on the development of one. I have setup SVN servers before, and I hear a lot about distributed version control systems like git. I used to see a lot of code hosted at sourceforge, but their site annoys me more than anything else these days with half a dozen clicks and lots of ads just to download anything.
At this point I’m sort of leaning towards GitHub for hosting, for no reason other than it seems popular and is free for open source.
If you’ve got a suggestion or recommendation, or are interested in helping with the code, please contact us or send us a note on twitter, we’d love your ideas.