Increasingly community developments are becoming available to augment the existing DSpace functionality, and it is important that these developments both fit alongside the core system and have the potential to be incorporated into the main distribution. Open source development can be very successful if community developments are encouraged and easily added. Here we use the Tapir e-theses management tools developed at Edinburgh University Library as an example of third party development and how those developments can be integrated, in whole or in part, into the DSpace core. This includes: the design decisions that need to be made when first developing the additional software; determining the applicability of parts of the software for the main codebase, to aid a consistent direction of development; and finally the patch creation process, with the additional administrative code requirements that are not necessarily present in the original code.

This should provide a good introduction to developing for DSpace for those already doing so, or those preparing to do so.