An integral part of Make Saturdays is transparency. Transparency with funding and pricing, with the design and research processes, and with code as well. Evidently, every software project out there makes use of open sourced code from different communities across the Internet. We'd like to contribute as well and every line of code we write will be available here on GitHub.

The saturdays.core project is the code repository that powers makesaturdays.com. Our intentions with this is to build a solid foundation for developping e-commerce businesses efficiently without the constraints of current cloud hosted platforms. We're open to all comments and contributions, as well as bug reports of course.

It's design and development will work towards these basic principles:

1. Express ideas or introduce concepts in plain words
2. Be mindful of existing user representations or perceptions
3. Provide consistent design patterns
4. Aim to reduce cognitive load
5. Protect the user's data
6. Be helpful when things go wrong
7. Always permit undoing

Technically, saturdays.core runs on a Python 3.5 Flask app with a MongoDB 3.2 database, Grunt for running compilation tasks, Celery for its asynchronous task manager, Elasticsearch for its search capabilities, and Stripe Connect as its payment processor.

To run the saturdays.core source code locally on your own machines, you'll need to install the following:

1. Node.js: https://nodejs.org/en/
2. Grunt: http://gruntjs.com/getting-started
3. Python 3.5: https://www.python.org/downloads/

After cloning this repository run the following commandes in your terminal to install the required dependencies:

1. cd path/to/your/repository
2. npm install
3. grunt install

Once everything's successfully installed, run the following in seperate terminal windows to power a local server and livereloadable Sass, CoffeeScript and Handlebars compile tasks:

1. grunt start
2. grunt compilers

A good place to start is at the saturdays/templates layout files and look into the saturdays/source/styles Sass files folder and saturdays/scripts CoffeeScript files folders.

By default, saturdays.core attempts to connect to local MongoDB database with the URI mongodb://127.0.0.1:27017/database. However we recommend setting up a secure MongoDB deployment with compose.io, and once you have a new URI, you may update your environment variable by running the commands:

1. source environment/bin/activate
2. export MONGO_URI='mongodb://127.0.0.1:27017/database'

Don't hesitate to get in touch if there's anything we can help with: makesaturdays@gmail.com