On the SitePoint PHP blog editor Bruno Skvorc has a post sharing some of his experience contributing to an open source PHP project and the flow he followed to add in a new feature. The project in question is Gatekeeper, an "all in one", framework-agnostic solution for user authentication and authorization.

GateKeeper is a pretty nifty user registration, authentication and authorization library which uses its own database to store and query the user records. This means that it’s completely decoupled from your main app (so you can, essentially, use Postgre or Mongo for your business logic while using a completely different engine like MySQL for basic user records) and easy to tweak and extend.

[...] This post isn’t about Gatekeeper per-se, though. It’s about contributing to open source, and going about the right way to doing it.

He then breaks the rest of the post up into a few different steps in the contribution flow:

• Step 1: Ask the owner
• Step 2: Fork, clone, test
• Step 3: Plan of Action
• Step 4: Just Do It ™
• Step 5: Testing

He includes the code he contributed to the project and where each change needed to be made. He also shows how he tested the new feature and the results of calling his new method to count the number of records for a user, group, permission, etc.