A significant proportion of the work we do at Keplar involves helping companies to build out their ecommerce propositions. For speed and flexibility much of this work is done in PHP – or rather on well-established open-source technologies, such as CodeIgniter, MODx and Magento, which are built atop PHP.
To keep costs down for our clients and avoid “reinventing the wheel”, where possible we make use of existing libraries, plugins and extensions for these platforms. However this isn’t always possible, and sometimes we see an opportunity to improve (hopefully!) on the existing options.
At Keplar we’re keen to open-source any such code which we develop and own ourselves (i.e. isn’t part of a client deliverable) which we think could be useful for a wider audience. Open sourcing in-house technology has two clear benefits in our eyes: firstly it helps to support the open source ecosystems on which we depend, and secondly, the more eyes we can get on the code we use in the wild the better.
As our first tentative steps down this route, we are open sourcing a PayPal e-commerce library for CodeIgniter which we are already using in production on a couple of clients. We are releasing this library under the guise of an initiative which we are calling “Orderly” – we hope to release other e-commerce software and libraries under this banner in the future.
