Installing Add-Ons TTW
by Ross Patterson
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last modified
Feb 10, 2008 10:22 PM
point-and-click installation of Plone extensions
While building this site I was reminded of one of the areas where Plone has fallen behind some of the competition: installing add-ons. With buildout, eggs, entry_points, easy_install, and PyPI it seems like providing a TTW, one-step, point-and-click add-on install story is just a matter of stitching together the pieces. It's a project that I would love to work on if I ever have any free time or if anyone wants to sponsor it.
Is there any work out there on this already?
Martin Lundwall in my Company (Webworks Sweden) has released an egg called "eggnest":
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/buildout.eggnest
http://jorgenmodin.net/[…]/eggnest---a-product-folder-for-buildout
It allows each egg spec in a buildout config to be in its own little text file in a directory. Each file with a text snippet in it is then combined with the buildout config on buildout.
The next step could be to have these text snippets in a signed repository on the Internet, and they could be managed (downloaded to the folder) through the web, in a Plone control panel, similar to the behaviour a a package manager such as synaptic on Ubuntu.
/Jörgen