Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: RFP: Site-level vs. Instance-level Package Parameters

Site-level param change can be achieved in a service package, and Instance-level with application packages, so everything depends where you store your params.
For instance, we wanted to have some params for all the /dotlrn (and the instances below it), so, instead of putting them into dotlrn package (which can have multiple instances), we decided to put into dotlrn-portlet, which is a service, then, if we change their values, all the applications that use this service will have that change reflected and in our case, it made a lot of sense to put the params in the portlet.
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Posted by Jeff Davis on
Malte: a lot of the things that we want to make "site params" are things that really should not be changed per instance (executables or paths are a good example -- allowing package admins to change these can be a security hole not to mention generally not sensible things to do).

And Roc is right that if you set up a service you can provide sitewide vars that way and the ui package which uses the service can hold the per instance variables. Unfortunately there are an awful lot of params already we want to change to be sitewide and I would hate to have to create 20 or 30 service packages to accomplish that.