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Community-driven Development

Shop3 is intended to grow as a free OpenCart theme/platform with an open development process. Merchant feedback and community signals matter, but they do not replace architecture review.

Philosophy

The project is:

  • free to use;
  • developed in public;
  • shaped by real merchant and community feedback;
  • guided by a roadmap instead of random feature accumulation;
  • open to donation signals that help prioritise work.

The project is not:

  • a queue of instant custom requests;
  • a place for unreviewed vendor hacks;
  • a shortcut around OpenCart conventions;
  • a reason to merge architecture-breaking features;
  • a paid priority lane that bypasses maintainability.

Donations As Signal

Donations influence priority, not engineering standards.

A donation can signal that a merchant problem is important, common, or urgent. It cannot force instant implementation, architecture violations, core edits, performance regressions, compatibility breaks, chaotic feature merges, or hidden private logic in the public theme.

Idea Review Gates

Every idea goes through:

  • architecture principles;
  • roadmap phase relevance;
  • maintainability review;
  • compatibility review;
  • performance review.

A useful idea may still wait if it belongs to a later phase or depends on foundations that do not exist yet.

Feature Request Lifecycle

  1. Capture the request in GitHub with a clear problem statement.
  2. Classify it as bug, improvement, theme setting, UI component, integration, compatibility, or future idea.
  3. Check whether it fits the current roadmap phase.
  4. Check architecture boundaries and OpenCart conventions.
  5. Decide whether it needs an architecture doc, ADR, implementation PR, OPS issue, or rejection.
  6. If accepted, implement through small reviewable PRs.
  7. Validate and document any follow-up debt or roadmap impact.

Roadmap Priority vs Acceptance vs Sponsorship

Roadmap priority means the project may work on the item sooner.

Architecture acceptance means the approach is approved and compatible with project principles.

Sponsorship signal means the community or merchants value the problem enough to influence prioritisation.

These are separate decisions. A sponsored request still needs architecture acceptance.