Hi Paul, On Sep 4, 2007, at 8:22 AM, Paul Armstrong wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 29, 2007 at 10:49:34AM +0200, Thomas Drevon wrote: >> Pavel Kolesnikov wrote: >>> One more question: is there any mechanism/best-practice how to >>> keep my >>> Xwiki extensions (plugins, Xwiki classes, templates, ...) >>> isolated somehow >>> to make future upgrades of Xwiki as easy as possible? >> >> Yes. In my opinion, only do changes to your xwiki instance by >> >> 1. Editing pages (e.g. html or velocity). These changes consists of >> updating your database, and will thus survive an xwiki update. >> However, >> should the database structure change (dunno how often this >> happens) you >> are of course in trouble. >> >> 2. Write homebrew java plugins (package as jar and copy into >> WEB-INF/lib/) which you invoke from xwiki pages. >> >> Under no circumstance edit .vm files. This may seem like at decent >> idea >> at first, but will gradually make upgrade something you will try to >> avoid. Which of course is the opposite of progress. > > What do you suggest for customizing things that are stored in .vm > files > in the skins directory rather than the database? > > The other thing that I find makes updates significantly harder is > if you > update pre-defined pages. For example, editing Blog.Macros causes > me to > go through some pain every time I do an update. This is indeed a very interesting topic for which we need to do 2 things: 1) Work on making it easier to upgrade XWiki versions 2) Document best practices for upgrading I had started doing so here: http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/ AdminGuide/Installation#HUpgradinganexistingwiki However it deserves a proper page on xwiki.org, in the admin guide. Would you be interested in starting such a page there? (if so please go ahead) so that everyone can add to it? So far, we've listed 2 practices in this thread: 1) Avoid touching Templates and skin files. 2) Avoid modifying default pages in the XWiki space. If you do the best practice I think is to leave the current page as is and instead copy it to a new page and then use that page. What I'd love to see in the future is the following: A) Separate the default XWiki Enterprise XAR into a set of small application XAR. I've started defining them (see the components defined in JIRA for the XWiki Enterprise project) B) Implement an Application manager application to manage upgrading applications. See http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Idea/ ApplicationManager (implementation is old but specification is still ok). I guess there could be a comparison done on application pages and if a change is found in the user wiki then a window asking which version to use would pop up with a diff of the 2 versions. C) A new skin that is easy to extend and which offers extension points. I know work has been started on this by Laurent Lunati but I don't know when it'll be done. In the further future, we'll need to implement some UI extension capability such as: http:// www.nabble.com/-ArchitectureV2--UI-Interfaces-tf3432811.html#a9569729 Thanks -Vincent _______________________________________________ users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xwiki.org/mailman/listinfo/users
