Standards and Certification Requirements for MDPro 1.1 and Beyond

Following are some of the standards for MDPro for 1.1 and beyond. We hope third party developers will incorporate them also. They are required for modules to be certified for use with MDPro. The level of certification will be included in our downloads and links sections as part of the module description. Please note that MDlite is our bridge to move to the 1.1 structure and that modules coded for 1.1 should thus work in MDlite.

Modules

Level 1 certification

All level 2 requirements plus the following:

Having the module name take its name from the directory name, which may be changed by a site admin. This will allow renaming the module to other languages.

Level 2 certification

All level 3 requirements plus the following:

Compliance with XHTML standards.

Compliance with CSS 2 standards.

Compliance with Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, and other major government mandated standards.

Templating using whichever templating system the MD developers decide upon.

Level 3 certification

API compliance. For details, see API Standards for MDPro 1.1 and Beyond

The module structure must be:

directory

/lang
/block
/images

Defines must be alphabetized. All the defines must be included in lang/your language/global.php (we will no longer use user.php admin.php init.php in language defines).
The manual.html page for the online manual can be included in lang/your language/

version.php file must be called version.php and not Version.php

Multi-lingual.

Use of relative font sizes.

Modules that may have any information that requires admin approval should make use of the Incoming block (waiting content) so the site administrator will have a single location that alerts him or her to pending content requiring attention. This includes everything from classified ads submitted to links, broken links reports and anything else requiring administrative action.

Make use of the central ban facility that will be in MDP 1.1 It will apply to text, people, IP addresses, domain names, etc. and allow for full site ban control.   See Bioban and MDContact Control in the downloads section for more detail.

Themes

Themes that use relative font sizes and meet css/xhtml standards compliance may receive MDP certification.