Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: ETP and the -100 root folder

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Posted by Don Baccus on
You're paralleling some of my own thinking, which starts with the observation that the use of folder -100 in the toolkit is one of those horrible hacks I so loath.  I haven't quite gotten my mind around it to where I'm sure of the best solution, though.

But when I have thought about it ... yes, packages should make package-instance folder for their content.  Having this map the site map, yes, there would be advantages to this but the first point is crucial.

For instance, file storage is totally messed up.  It always makes a root folder at the root, so permissions aren't inherited through the sitemap, i.e. the subsite it's moutned under.  That truly sucks.  This is why the dotLRN code makes a folder for a class then immediately revokes and grants a bunch of permissions.  Yuk.

Fixing file-storage is on my personal list of things to do, out of pure hatred for the way it's implemented.

One forum per forum package instance ... this certainly simplifies it.  In general I think this simplistic approach is right for packages, makes them simple to write and once we have subsites straightened out should help consistency.

But it increases the burden on subsite - Dave's example being a good one.  subsite will need to be taught how to gather admin information about a suite of mounted packages (service contract approach?)  But doing it once in the subsite package rather than adding custom pages to packages each in their own style etc should, overall, make life simpler if we can figure out a good way to do it.

Ditto things like the forums page that lists user contributions.  We really want that kind of stuff happening at the subsite level, if each package takes it on themselves the look/feel will undoubtably be different everywhere, given that independent groups of people are writing all these things.