On Contributing to Aalto-LaTeX
If you want to contribute to Aalto-LaTeX, you can upload your package/class to the Development Playground, under the section that corresponds to the main use of your package/class. There, the users of Aalto-LaTeX can give comments on your work so you can develop and improve your work. In the Development Playground, different solutions can co-exist. From these parallel solutions, a combinative solution that uses the best parts of the propositions will be developed, and this solution will become the official template for that task. Summa summarum, the development happens via community contribution.
When uploading your package/class to the Development Playground, make sure that you also include an adequate documentation of the features of your package/class. This means that those users who want to test your contribution do not need to decipher your LaTeX code in order to understand what (s)he needs to do in order to get the intended functionality. Furthermore, if you want that your contribution will become a part of the official package/class, you need to use the aaltologo package which provides the official implementation of Aalto University visual guidelines.
Naming Your Contribution
When uploading your contribution to the Development Playground, it is easier to distribute your work as a single zip file than as a set of individual files. Give your package a name that will easily distinguish it from the others uploaded to the same section. If you upload an update for your contribution, include the version number (see below) or the date to the file name.
LaTeX vs. TeX compliance
Since the aaltologo package requires LaTeX2e, you don't need to design you package/class to be TeX compliant. Those users who use only plain TeX instead of LaTeX are very few, and the main user group of these packages/classes distributed here use LaTeX anyway, it is easier to make your code only LaTeX compliant.
In order to ease the possible change in package/class maintainership, write your code according to the guidelines found in the document "LaTeX2e for class and package writers". Furthermore, by doing so the comparison of the different solutions will be much easier.
Plain TeX Users
Unfortunately Aalto-LaTeX does not fully support plain TeX. However, since plain TeX requires slightly better knowledge about the TeX typesetting in general, you probably could easily adapt the code distributed here to plain TeX compliant. If you do so, please contact the maintainers.
On Version Numbering
Since the contributions distributed in the Development Playground are not official packages/classes, their version numbering should be thought carefully. Version numbering is a topic of its own, but for instance the aaltologo package has used, uses, and will use version numbering scheme X.Y where X denotes the higher level version of the package and Y is the subversion. For smaller changes, like the inclusion of new package options or a minor change in a command, the subversion number is increased by one whereas for larger changes, like the change of the approach, the higher level version number is increased. For the draft (development) versions the aaltologo package used a higher level version number 0, and the published version has a higher level version number 1. It is not required that you use the same scheme in your own version numbering, but it is recommended especially for the packages/classes that are developed to become an official package/class.