Contributing back to the open source community

Here in Creative Services we make extensive use of open-source software, from web browsers and text editors to code frameworks and databases. These projects are free to download and allow anyone to view or modify the source code. Many of our high-profile projects use open-source code, including the Ampersandbox (uses the Codeigniter PHP framework) and our mobile website (utilizing the Mobile Web OSP mobile framework from Dave Olsen at West Virginia University).

One of the best aspects of the open-source community is the ability to contribute back to the projects you are using. This reciprocity helps users and developers quickly find and squash bugs in the software, as well as allow new features to be added by more than just the original creators of the project. So in that vein, we decided to contribute back some additions we made to Mobile Web OSP. The Social Media RSS add-on to Mobile Web OSP allows for easier handling and parsing of social media RSS feeds, and substitutes (yet another open source project) SimplePie as the RSS parser for the site.

The full documentation and download link to the add-on, as well as a full list of the open-source projects we use, are available in the new open-source projects section of the Creative Services site.

Is there an open-source product that you use daily that you would recommend to others?

-Tiffany Broadbent