Newbie question

I'm not actually a newbie, but I'm afeared this question is.

I've been following and using PHPWiki for years; I spent a long time 
hacking up 1.2.* for personal use. I'm eagerly awaiting 1.4 for a few 
installations, and I'm sure some customization and tweaking will follow. 
This time, however, I want to do it right. I want to be able to upgrade 
as the product changes. I want to be able to isolate and save my 
changes. I want the option of submitting my work back to the project.

However, I'm not 100% sure how to go about it. I looked into the inner 
workings of diff and patch a bit months ago. Is that the place to start? 
Does anyone have a pointer to a good reference for someone who is not a 
necessarily a coding newbie but is a project newbie? How about my own 
code? Should I use source control for that? Any other best practices I 
should look into?

Sorry if this is ramantly off-topic (can't be worse than the 
administrivia reply-to thread :), but any pointers (reply-to just me is 
fine, too :) would be much appreciated.

russ



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