This month of December, Paule Morizot and Fabien Moreau of PrestaShop spoke at Open Source Experience about the project’s Call for Contributions. What a great place to give an update on this topic and to show an experienced crowd what we are currently doing at PrestaShop.

Open Source Experience, held at the Cité des Sciences in Paris, is one of Europe’s premier events for open source software, bringing together maintainers, contributors, and organizations committed to collaborative development. For PrestaShop, it was the perfect venue to share how we’re evolving our approach to community contributions, moving from good intentions to measurable impact.

Like many open source projects, PrestaShop has long welcomed community contributions. But the reality has been mixed: unprocessed pull requests, overloaded internal teams, and contributions that struggled to align with our product roadmap. Without a shared direction, too much community effort wasn’t reaching its full potential.

That’s why we launched Call for Contributions: a structured, thematic approach that focuses community energy on high-value topics. Rather than scattering efforts across hundreds of possible improvements, we now run time-boxed campaigns anchored to our roadmap, complete with specifications, acceptance criteria, and dedicated maintainer support.

The results speak for themselves. Our first Call for Contributions, the #HookChallenge launched in March 2025, aimed for 10 new hooks in six months. The community delivered 32 pull requests and 19 merged hooks in just three months. Our second campaign, focused on the Admin API, has already seen strong engagement!

At Open Source Experience, Paule and Fabien shared (link in French) not just our successes, but the framework behind them: how we select topics, prepare the technical groundwork, support contributors, and integrate their work smoothly into our roadmap. It’s a model we believe can help other large-scale open source projects turn community enthusiasm into sustainable collaboration.

Open Source Experience 2025

Given the importance of this event in the open source world and the opportunity to share our perspective on this topic, it’s worth highlighting our involvement in open source as it is at the core of our mission.

Since 2007, PrestaShop has been built on a clear conviction: merchants should own their shops, their data, their code, and their future. Our open source philosophy is rooted in transparency, collaboration, and independence. We provide a European alternative to other platforms where 230,000+ merchants and thousands of developers maintain full control.

This commitment extends beyond our platform. Through partnerships with foundations like OW2 and other organizations, we’re helping shape best practices for large-scale open source collaboration. Call for Contributions is one concrete example of this work: a structured approach to community collaboration that we believe can benefit the broader open source movement. Events like Open Source Experience give us the opportunity to share what we’ve learned and contribute back to the ecosystem that makes our work possible.

At PrestaShop, we believe that open collaboration with aligned objectives makes our entire ecosystem thrive: our Call for Contributions embodies this principle perfectly. We’ve built a space where commerce can reach its full potential, specifically designed for the thousands of partners and developers who power our ecosystem. Together, we’re shaping the future of commerce, one contribution at a time.