mahara-contributors team mailing list archive

[Aaron Wells <1521418@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Public bug reported:

Mahara blocktypes that display a particular type of artefact, typically
live "underneath" that artefact. For instance the "image" blocktype, for
displaying images, lives under htdocs/artefact/file/blocktype/image

This causes us a lot of coding headaches, because whenever we're
locating a plugin we have to take this special case into account. And,
it doesn't give us much in the way of benefit. It can act as a kind of
crude dependency/package-management, and it makes a certain conceptual
organizational sense, but that's about it.

So, I think it would help us straighten out our code base if we
refactored the code to get rid of "live-in" blocktypes. My proposal is:

1. Move all the live-in blocktypes to the htdocs/blocktype directory
2. Remove the code that handles their special location
3. Add a sanity check that tries to detect if a live-in blocktype is present, when installing a new artefact (in order to tell people that their plugins need to be upgraded)
4. (Optionally) Add a dependency management system to the standard plugin/version.php file: Bug 1299908

Adding item #4 would help to address the one bit of functionality we
lose. But it's not strictly required; you could just depend site admins
to manually install the necessary plugins. And the individual plugin
sanity check can be used as a makeshift dependency checker.

** Affects: mahara
     Importance: Low
         Status: Confirmed


** Tags: api blocktype plugins refactoring

** Changed in: mahara
       Status: New => Confirmed

** Changed in: mahara
   Importance: Undecided => Low

** Tags added: api blocktype plugins refactoring

** Description changed:

  Mahara blocktypes that display a particular type of artefact, typically
  live "underneath" that artefact. For instance the "image" blocktype, for
  displaying images, lives under htdocs/artefact/file/blocktype/image
  
  This causes us a lot of coding headaches, because whenever we're
  locating a plugin we have to take this special case into account. And,
  it doesn't give us much in the way of benefit. It can act as a kind of
  crude dependency/package-management, and it makes a certain conceptual
  organizational sense, but that's about it.
  
  So, I think it would help us straighten out our code base if we
  refactored the code to get rid of "live-in" blocktypes. My proposal is:
  
  1. Move all the live-in blocktypes to the htdocs/blocktype directory
  2. Remove the code that handles their special location
  3. Add a sanity check that tries to detect if a live-in blocktype is present, when installing a new artefact (in order to tell people that their plugins need to be upgraded)
- 4. (Optionally) Add a dependency management system to the standard plugin/version.php file
+ 4. (Optionally) Add a dependency management system to the standard plugin/version.php file: Bug 1299908
  
  Adding item #4 would help to address the one bit of functionality we
- lose. But it would be a big job, so it would be best to file that as a
- separate bug.
+ lose. But it's not strictly required; you could just depend site admins
+ to manually install the necessary plugins. And the individual plugin
+ sanity check can be used as a makeshift dependency checker.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1521418

Title:
  Refactoring: Move out the blocktypes that live under artefacts

Status in Mahara:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  Mahara blocktypes that display a particular type of artefact,
  typically live "underneath" that artefact. For instance the "image"
  blocktype, for displaying images, lives under
  htdocs/artefact/file/blocktype/image

  This causes us a lot of coding headaches, because whenever we're
  locating a plugin we have to take this special case into account. And,
  it doesn't give us much in the way of benefit. It can act as a kind of
  crude dependency/package-management, and it makes a certain conceptual
  organizational sense, but that's about it.

  So, I think it would help us straighten out our code base if we
  refactored the code to get rid of "live-in" blocktypes. My proposal
  is:

  1. Move all the live-in blocktypes to the htdocs/blocktype directory
  2. Remove the code that handles their special location
  3. Add a sanity check that tries to detect if a live-in blocktype is present, when installing a new artefact (in order to tell people that their plugins need to be upgraded)
  4. (Optionally) Add a dependency management system to the standard plugin/version.php file: Bug 1299908

  Adding item #4 would help to address the one bit of functionality we
  lose. But it's not strictly required; you could just depend site
  admins to manually install the necessary plugins. And the individual
  plugin sanity check can be used as a makeshift dependency checker.

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