I'm happy to change the private function to protected. I'm also happy to fix coding style violations if you let me know what I've violated, or point me to a list of rules. I'm pretty new to contributing to open source... I've tried to be consistent with the current coding style.

Mark, out of interest, what's wrong with a private function in a framework context? If the function is never intended to be called outside the class, including being never called from subclasses etc, then why not make it private? On the off-chance that you have to call it from elsewhere in some unforeseeable future case, you could always change it to protected / public at that point.