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| Proposal | Add possibility to install distributions (packages) via the extension manager |
| Owner/Starter | Susanne Moog |
| Participants/Members | |
| Status | Draft, Discussion, Voting Phase, Accepted, Declined, Withdrawn |
| Current Progress | Unknown, Started, Good Progress, Bad Progress, Stalled, Review Needed, DONE |
| Topic for Gerrit | distributionmanager |
- Started during TYPO3 CMS 6.2 development
Up until now the introduction and government packages had to be delivered as part of a whole TYPO3 installation as there was no easy way to provide out of the box installations without delivering the core with it. The new distribution management aims at making it possible to deliver and install full packages as normal extension via the extension manager. Therefor making maintenance of existing and creation of new packages much easier.
To be able to install a package we have to take care of the following parts:
- Deliver initial database data
- Deliver fileadmin files
- Deliver configuration for a package
- Be able to hook into the process after saving configuration to trigger actions dependent on configuration values (for example color selection in the old introduction package)
- Deliver custom dependent extensions (customized versions or extensions not available through TER)
- Display available distributions in the extension manager
- Send an user to the distribution installation page after initial installation (not finished)
Most of the following will work for every kind of extension, although there are parts specific to distributions, like an automatic redirect to the distribution welcome page after installation. To enable distribution handling for your extension you will have to change its category to distribution.
To deliver initial data within an extension you have to follow the following conventions:
extension/Initialisation/data.t3d: Put a .t3d export of your database data called data.t3d in this location and it will be imported (at root level) during installation
extension/Initialisation/Files/: Add your files here, they will be copied to fileadmin/extension/ during installation
Distribution configuration is just normal extension configuration delivered in ext_conf_template. After configuration is written the signal "afterExtensionConfigurationWrite" is dispatched.
An extension can work as its own extension repository. Add unpacked extensions to extension/Initialisation/Extensions to provide dependencies. Your main extension has to be dependent on these extension as normal dependencies in ext_emconf. Extensions delivered inside an extension have the highest priority when extensions need to be fetched. Caution, these will not overwrite extensions already present in the system.
For your own distributions you should provide a preview image in Resources/Public/Images/Distribution.png and a bigger welcome image in Resources/Public/Images/DistributionWelcome.png.
Image size for the preview should be 220x150 pixels, for the welcome image 300x400 pixels.