This article describes my personal recommendation which links are useful, and which development environment to choose.
There are plenty of other ways of doing development, but this is the way I recommend doing it at the moment.
First, a couple of links where to register:
For the development environment:
For the codebase, it is now official: please use the now official repository of OpenPetra at Github: https://github.com/openpetra/openpetra.