This guide is mainly aimed for developers, but it can give useful insights on how LWT is structured, which could help you for debugging. The first step you need to take is to clone LWT from the official GitHub repository (HugoFara/lwt).

Get Composer

Getting Composer is required if you want to edit LWT on the server side, but it will also make be useful to edit JS and CSS code, so it is highly recommended. Composer is a light-weight dependency manager that does not need a server for running.

Once Composer is ready, go the the lwt folder (most likely lwt/), and type

composer install --dev

This will automatically dowload all the required dependencies.

Create and Edit Themes

Themes are stored at src/themes/. If you want to create a new theme, simply add it in a subfolder. You can also edit existing themes.

To apply the changes you made on a theme, run

composer minify

This command will minify all CSS and JS.

Alternatively, you can run

php -r "require 'src/php/minifier.php'; minifyAllCSS();"

It minifies CSS only.

Debug your theme

You may not want to see your code minified, so you can use

composer no-minify

It has the same effect as copying the folder scr/themes/ to themes/. WARNING: it can break your relative paths!

Add Images to your Themes

We support a smart minifying system: relative path are automatically adapted to point to the previous location while minifying only. As a consequence:

You can use images from css/images/ in your theme.
- If your theme is under src/themes/mytheme/, you should use the path ../../../css/theimage.
You can add your own files under your custom theme folder.
- Hence the path should look like ./myimage.

When debugging your theme, files are simply copied to the themes/ folder, which can break the path to files in css/.

My theme does not contain all the Skinning Files!

That's not a problem at all. When LWT looks for a file that should be contained in src/themes/{{The Theme}}/, it checks if the file exists. If not, it goes to css/ and tries to get the same file. With this system, your themes does not need to have the same files as src/css/.

Change JS behaviour

As with themes, LWT minifies JS code for a better user experience. Please refer to the previous section for detailed explanations, this section will only go through import points.

Edit JS code

Clear code is stored at src/js/. Once again, the actual code used by LWT should be at js/. After you have done any modification, either run composer minify or php -r "require 'src/php/minifier.php'; minifyAllJS();".

Debug JS code

To copy code in a non-obfuscated form, run composer no-minify, or replace the content of js/ by src/js/.

Edit PHP code

The PHP codebase is not yet well structured, but here is a general organisation:

The visible for the user is under the root folder (do_text.php, do_test.php, etc...)
Files that should not be rendered directly are under the inc/ ("include") folder.
Other files useful for development only are under src/php/.

Testing your Code

It is higly advised to test your code. Tests should be wrote under tests/. We use PHP Unit for testing.

To run all tests:

composer test

Alternatively:

./vendor/bin/phpunit

Security Check

We use Psalm to find code flaws and inconsistencies. Use ./vendor/bin/psalm.

Your can configure the reporting level in psalm.xml.

Advice: follow Code Style Standards

Nobody likes to debug unreadable code. A good way to avoid thinking about it is to include phpcs directly into your IDE. You can also download it and run it regularly on your code.

Improving Documentation

To regenerate all documentation, use composer doc.

General Documentation

The documentation in split across Markdown (.md) files in docs/. Then, those files are requested by info.php. The final version is info.html, that contains all files.

To regenerate info.hml, run composer info.html.

Code Documentation

Code documentation (everything under docs/html/) is automatically generated. If you see an error, the PHP code is most likely at fault. However, don't hesitate to signal the issue.

Currently, the documentation is generated through Doxygen (run doxygen Doxyfile to regenerate it), but this is likely to change.

Other ways of Contribution

Drop a star on GitHub

This is an Open-Source project. It means that anyone can contribute, but nobody gets paid for improving it. Dropping a star, leaving a comment or posting an issue is essential, because the only retributions developers get from time spent on LWT is to discuss with users.

Share the Word

LWT is a non-profitable software, so we won't have much time, and no money, to advertise LWT. If you enjoy LWT and want to see it grow, share it!

Discuss

Either go to the forum of the official LWT version, or come and discuss on the community version.

Thanks for your interest in contributiong!