Like many small companies doing development on the Web, Common Media depends heavily on free and open-source software. Part of the point of open source is that a programmer using the program (or library, or plug-in) may get in to the code and wrangle it around until it works best for them. The obligation that comes with that freedom is to “give back” any such changes if they may be useful to the wider community. With big projects, that can mean active participation in a coding community; for smaller packages, it may just mean sending code back to the maintainer for consideration.

We mentioned a few weeks ago how we tweaked a plug-in for Common Kitchen. Today, that code became our first checked-in contribution to an open-source project, Netphase‘s acts_as_amazon_product. Hopefully it won’t be the last.

(I also took the opportunity to use a topical test case. Check the commit to see which magazine we test magazine searching with.)