Slight restructuring to BoltWire...

[Dan Vis]

After thinking more about the recent discussion of how to structure BoltWire, an interesting thought occurred to me. By making a few changes to how the core and site directory structures, it would be quite easy to create a custom shared folder off of a live site.

Specifically:

1) Currently the system folder has these folders: pages, plugins, img, skins, and the shared folder the same basic folders.

2) The individual site folders have pages, config, files, and skins (inside of files), and other folders. Very similar.

3) Now suppose we change img to files, and plugins to config in the default distribution, and then moved the skins folder up a level in the site folder so it is side by side with files. Now you have a perfect match. 

4) Next suppose you create a custom "vanilla" site with special plugins, pages, skins, configuration, etc. You can create an exact duplicate of it by simply creating a new site and setting the shared folder to that site, rather than the empty core shared folder. Or take an existing site, duplicate it, eliminate the custom content, and you end up with your "vanilla" template for a sister site. Quite powerful!

For example, suppose you create a "base" cookbook site. You can now create a dozen other cookbook sites instantly--each fully editable and customizable without changing the original cookbook site. And if you did make some tweak to the original cookbook site, all the other sites are upgraded instantly. 

I don't know why I didn't think about this earlier, but that makes a lot of crazy stuff super easy to do. My accelerator hosting program is just one example. But there are others. This really expands on BoltWire's potential as an application builder...

The downside:

If we go this route, we will have to move our site skins out of the files folder in each of our sites. And that means existing skins with links to image in the old location for example would all need to be tweaked. Which could be quite a hassle. But it certainly seems to me skins should be a top level folder of its own...

I also personally think plugins is better than config. It does require every site to change that folder name from config to plugins--whereas changing the core is just one change. But if we're already having to tinker with the skins location, this is trivial in comparison.

Anyway, I'm almost certain to go this route because of it's incredible potential. We're not too far into 7.xx that a lot of people are going to be affected. And in the long run that one initial change will definitely be worth it.

Feedback, questions, welcome...

Dan

[mz]

This sounds reasonable and will maybe encourage users to set up more than one site.

Greetings, Martin