Developer Rules

• Don't revert someone elses commits without really good cause (the code is completely broken and you can't get ahold of the committer)
• Massive changes to code that another developer makes significant changes to should be run past that dev as best practice
• Incorrectly reverting someone elses commit and causing them to hunt for a bug they know they fixed grants them the right to send the bar bill to you for a month :)
• Don't knowingly commit code that breaks the tree; sometimes you will have code that's work in progress than needs to be committed, try to commit it somewhere it won't break the tree (ie. interfaces_new.inc instead of interfaces.inc).
• Pre-commit authorization such as in OpenBSD isn't used in pfSense, we do however run sanity checks on committed files and use a cvs acl script to keep commits to authorized branches.

HTML Specific Rules

Note: Wrong HTML code is broken code. To break the code isn't allowed. A C compiler for example would complain in most cases if you break the code syntactically. So just because most browser are ignoring wrong code does not mean that you are not in charge to fix the code you did break.

pfSense uses the XHTML doctype∞ in its webGUI code. The doctype enforces you to code against the following ruleset:

• please use lower case tag names and not a mix of upper case and lower case tag names
• breaks need to be closed (<br />)
• image tags need to be closed (<img />)
• an image tag "always" has an alt attribute, tho it may contain no value
• horizontal rule tags need to be closed (<hr />)
• HTML form fields need to be closed (<input />)
• ampersands in an URL (e.g. within a href attribute) need to be coded as a HTML entity (e.g. &)
• special characters (e.g. umlauts) need to be coded as HTML entities. see: http://en.selfhtml.org/html/referenz/zeichen.htm∞ (in German, sorry. but the table is self explaining)
• a <table /> tag does not have a name attribute "period"
• a <div /> tag does not have a name attribute "period"
• a <ul /> tag does not have a name attribute "period"
• a <li /> tag does not have a name attribute "period"
• checkbox checked attributes need to be coded as checked="checked"
• HTML field disabled attributes need to be coded as disabled="disabled"
• HTML field readonly attributes need to be coded as readonly="readonly"
• any HTML <input /> field has a type attribute (e.g. type="text")
• same applies for nowrap (nowrap="nowrap") etc.
• opening <p>, <b> tags do have a matching closing tag (e.g. </p>)
• <table /> tags do not contain a <form /> tag.
• please place the inputerror <div /> after the "tabnavtbl" < td />, before the "mainarea" <dic />
• please place the "iform" <form /> tag right before the "tabcont" <table /> tag
• there's no reason to include the inputerror <div /> twice within the same HTML file
• the "type" attribute of a <form /> tag needs to contain a lower case value (e.g. type="post" or type="get")
• the language="JavaScript" attribute for <script /> tags is deprecated. Use the type="text/javascript" attribute instead.
• always use lowercase attribute names for calling JavaScript events (e.g. onclick="foobar();")
• the <embed /> tag is deprecated use <object /> instead
• if you assign style attribute to a HTML element like this : element.style.borderTop = "2px solid #990000"; it needs to be enclosed by quotes

It's possible to syntax check you code in Firefox with the HTML validator plugin∞. Or you can simple use the W3C validator∞. The latter is supported by Opera even for RFC 1918 networks. Validom∞ is a validator, thatdoes not validate against SGML. The validome guys do pretend, that this produces better results.

PHP Specific Rules

Rule #1:

• Every time a rule is not followed, there must be good reason for this.

General rules

• All php files must start with an (english) header block
• Use descriptive (english) variable names
• Use lower-case variable names ($my_very_long_var_name) or Java-style names ($myVeryLongVarName)
• Add (english) comments, whenever necessary or helpful
• Add "TODO:" comments, when there's something to be done
• Add "FIXME:" comments, when there's something broken
• add "NOTE:" comments, when there's something other people should know
• Try to code in a readable way:
  $header = "<head>$foo</head>";
  $message = "SOME{$bar}TEXT";
  

  is easier to read than
  

  $header="<head>".$foo."</head>";
  $message = "SOME" . $bar . "TEXT";
  
• Try to simpify your code for better readability:
  if ($bool1)
  

  if ($bool2)
  

  if ($bool3)
  

  do_it();
  

  whatever();
  

  sould be written as:
  

  if ($bool1 && $bool2 && $bool3)
  

  do_it();
  

  whatever();
  
• Do not set unnessesary variables:
  $is_set = isset($var);
  if ($is_set) ...
  
• Loop variables are $i, $j, $k, ...
• All switch statements should have a default
• Do not make explicit comparisons to boolean values:
  while ($condition = = true) ...
  
• In classes, use "private", "protected" and "public", not "var" for attribute declaration
• Do not create source code lines longer than 80 chars
• Do not to use deprecated or obsolete functions
• If a PHP-internal function is an alias for another function, use the original (i.e. use exit() instead of die())

Indent style

• Use "K&R style" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indent_style∞)
  if ($x = = $y) {
  

  something();
  ...
  

  } else {
  

  somethingelse();
  ...
  

  }
  finalthing();
  
• There shouldn't be a space between a function name and it's argument list:
  isset($myvar);
  
• ... but separate function arguments with a single space:
  do_something($foo, 27, false);
  
• Use tabs for intendation (not spaces or a mixture of both)
• ... but use spaces in the middle of a line

config.xml

• Boolean values which are false should be un-set:
  $config['system']['enablesshd'] = "no";
  

  should be:
  

  unset($config['system']['enablesshd']);