Installer Consideration

Time to start planning the installer.

What I'd ultimately like to see is something integrated into the manager that can also perform updates and rollbacks from within the manager without having to touch an FTP program if possible.

Any thoughts on the best way to pull this off?

How does vBulletin do it? I think they store a whole lot of their code in the database itself. Could we run a DB query, then write the resulting "file instructions" out to the filesystem? vBulletin has a long history in doing things to make for good performance and fewer support issues from what I understand.

Then again, I'm just a troublemaker around here.

I used one system that had a form for uploading a zipped module package, then the script installed the files and updated the database. Of course, that meant that the module developer had to create an sql dump and an installation ini file, as well as be sure to include all script files and images the module needed.

I'd suggest looking at the installers with SMF and X-Cart, too.

X-Cart uses unified diffs plus SQL updaters to change both the DB and the scripts on the filesystem.

SMF downloads XML files with instructions on how to update the scripts and the database and contains a built in FTP client that can change the permissions, etc., on files it normally couldn't access.

SMF sounds much more interesting. While it's probably a lot more difficult to create mods/updates for the casual coder, the result for end users would be tremendous. Maybe we can borrow that code since it too is an open source project.

SMF downloads XML files with instructions on how to update the scripts and the database and contains a built in FTP client that can change the permissions, etc., on files it normally couldn't access.

Is XML support built into PHP4? Or do we have to compile it into php?

XML support is not native to PHP4, but it is for PHP5. We'd need to include an XML-parsing library/class/whatever.

XML support is not native to PHP4, but it is for PHP5. We'd need to include an XML-parsing library/class/whatever.

Is there an XML library/class/whatever that does not require an external dll or system file?

A quick Google yields this: http://keithdevens.com/software

Maybe something there would be helpful.

A quick Google yields this: http://keithdevens.com/software

Maybe something there would be helpful.

That's looking good but was last updated in July, 2004.

I've found another cool XML library called MiniXML http://minixml.psychogenic.com/

It looks very powerful and should work php4 and php5