Making Will Better and Better

Will is built entirely on the shoulders of giants, and has a great community of developers that move it forward. He wouldn't exist without all of them.

We also welcome new contributions no matter how big or small. Interested in contributing to will? We'd love to have you. Details below.

Our Culture

Anyone is welcome to contribute to will, regardless of skill level or experience. To make will the best he can be, we have one big, overriding cultural principle:

Be kind.

Simple. Easy, right?

We've all been newbie coders, we've all had bad days, we've all been frustrated with libraries, we've all spoken a language we learned later in life. In discussions with other coders, PRs, and CRs, we just give each the benefit of the doubt, listen well, and assume best intentions. It's worked out fantastically.

This doesn't mean we don't have honest, spirited discussions about the direction to move will forward, or how to implement a feature. We do. We just respect one other while we do it. Not so bad, right? :)

Improve will's core

For big core features, you're probably best off opening an issue, and discussing it with one of the core developers before you hack your nights and weekends away.

Core changes to will are very much welcome. In some cases, proposed changes have already been thought through, and there may be gotchas or sticking points we couldn't get past. In other cases, it might be a direction we've purposely decided not to take will. In most cases, we simply haven't thought of it, and would love the improvement!

It's always great to get a heads up of what's coming down the pipe, and have an open dialog. Thanks for reaching out and starting one!

In terms of the mechanics, you'll just want to:

Fork this repo.
Clone down a copy, set up redis and the env, as before.
Run ./start_dev_will.py to start up just core will.

Contribute new plugins

This one's pretty simple. Write good, clean code that does one thing well, document it properly, and submit a PR!

To submit a plugin that's running in your will,

Fork this repo.
Clone down a copy, set up redis and the env, as before.
pip install -r requirements.dev.txt
Copy your plugin and docs over to the core will repo,
Run ./start_dev_will.py to start up just core will, and test it out!

Code standards and PRs

This one's hopefully straightforward:

Incoming code should follow PEP8
If you add new core-level features, please add documentation in the docs folder (we use mkdocs). If you're not sure if they're needed, just ask!
Please add your name and attribution to the AUTHORS file.
Know you have our thanks for helping to make will even better!

Tests

Shamefully, tests are just getting rolling, and a proper, well-architected test harness is in the works. However, there are some tests you can run by running:

tox

More soon!

The Shoulders of Giants

Will leverages some fantastic libraries. He wouldn't exist without them.

Bottle for http handling,
Jinja for templating,
Sleekxmpp for listening to xmpp,
natural and parsedatetime for natural date parsing,
apscheduler for scheduled task parsing,
Requests to make http sane.

Will was originally written and is maintained by Steven Skoczen. Credit to GreenKahuna (now defunct) and BuddyUp for supporting those efforts with on-the-job time.

Will's also has had help from lots of coders. Alphabetically:

acommasplice fixed up the programmer help, so it works again.
adamcin gave you html support in 1-1 chats, using the new v2 API, and made bootstrapping more reliable.
adamgilman gave you the friendly error messages when the hipchat key was invalid.
antgel fixed the image plugin, for reals and added awesome documentation.
amckinley fixed a bug in the hipchat user list from missing params.
bfhenderson removed dependence on the v1 token, and made help more friendly.
borgstrom gave you beautifully architected storage backends, including support for couchbase and local storage.
brandonsturgeon jumped on hipchat's API-breaking change, and made will immune in a flash. Improved the docs all over, too.
BrianGallew improved the blacklist import mechanism, so blacklisted modules aren't even attempted to be imported, taught will to handle zombie users with grace, and fixed the file storage backend.
bsvetchine fixed a bug with README generation.
buran added HTML support to 1-1 messages.
carsongee pooled your redis connections.
camilonova fixed the @randomly decorator, and brought the joy of more pugs to your life. He's also reported several important bugs.
ckcollab was one of the original contributors, when will was first built at GreenKahuna.
charlax gave us batch-get of rooms via the V2 API.
chillipeper fixed up the max-size and handling of V2 rooms, and taught will how to use bottle's custom_filters.
crccheck gave you friendly error messages if your WILL_ROOMS was wrong.
d0ugal fixed up the docs to meet the new mkdocs standard.
danbourke submitted a fix for the >2000 rooms bug, and kept Will happy.
derek-adair found a solution for the duplicated 'hi' messages.
dpoirier figured out how to properly ignore the initial catch-up messages, and gave you log-level control.
dmuntean gave you proxy support, and kept it working..
hobson made setup.py more robust across operating systems, and improved the docs.
Ironykins brought you urban dictionary support.
kenden fixed up the redis docs for ubuntu/debian.
jbeluch found a bug with get_roster not populating in time.
jcdyer made the _available_rooms object consistent across API versions.
jessamynsmith was kind enough to port talkbackbot over, at my request, then kept it updated through version changes.
jquast did the noble and oft unappreciated work of spelling fixes.
keNzi added shorten url function using bitly service.
levithomason was one of the original contributors, when will was first built at GreenKahuna.
mark-adams cleaned up a Bitbucket typo.
mattcl taught will to reconnect to Slack when hiccups occur.
mike-love added Docker support to make running Will easier - and then re-updated it to support Will 2.x!
hobson made setup.py more robust across operating systems, and improved the docs.
neronmoon made it easier to mention will with non-standard case
michaeljoseph suggested improvements to setup and requirements.txt format.
mrgrue added support for the hipchat server beta.
mvanbaak brought you support for bitbucket uptime.
netjunkie fixed a duplicated help module, added an expire parameter to self.save(), added support for will watching hipchat's status, fixed some redis config bugs, and kept word game working on py3.
ostracon got chat room replies working for orgs with > 1000 rooms.
pcurry added travis support.
pepedocs added friendly timestamps to the default logging output.
PrideRage gave you access to a room's entire history, and suggested a better talkback regex.
quixeybrian wrote the awesome new help system and stopped the rate limit nightmare.
Regner upgraded the hiredis version to work on windows.
rbp added the admin_only argument, and fixed a bug with room not being passed along properly to messages.
shadow7412 cleaned up a bunch of regex, and fixed up image me after google pulled the free API.
sivy added a config flag for disabling SSL, and the ability to look up a user by nickname.
tenzer added python 3 support!
tomokas fixed a bug in the @randomly decorator.
tophsic made help friendlier, including plugin-specific help.
@TaunoTinits fixed the get_room_from_message method in 2.x.
wohali tracked down the annoying DNS thread issue, and got will on the right path.
woohgit added support for the v2 WorldWeatherOnline API, and fixed it when I broke it, and then fixed it again when they changed their endpoint. He also taught will how to say his version number. And remind ___ to ___ at ___. Awesome. And fixed lots of docs. And put the time zone with "what time is it?". And then added an entire Pagerduty workflow. And made message parsing more reliable. And wrote the ACL support. And even more doc fixes. And improvements on uptime monitoring edge cases. And kept Pagerduty working. And added append and pop list support. And ditched WorldWeatherOnline when it started to hurt. Yep.
wontonst made it simple to have will reply to a specific room, made reminders more friendly, and kept py2/3 compatability working on HipChat.
woparry made sure that Will could handle organizations with a massive (>2000) number of rooms.

Other Wills

If you're looking for plugin inspiration, here are some wills that are open-sourced:

Note: Have a will you've open-sourced? Please send it in a PR or Issue! This list is tiny!

Curious how Will's grown over the years? Check out the releases!