Posted by budda on April 30, 2014 at 9:48pm
Are there any documented plans / road map for how the app store built in to the Panopoly distro is going to work?
Right now it has been hard coded with the message "CURRENTLY UNDER DEVELOPMENT" in the available updates section.
I'd like to push this area forward if possible as it something i'd like to make use of in a new distro based on Panopoly.
What's the plan (in any) ?
Comments
ah I see that message is in
ah I see that message is in the theme tpl from the Apps module.
it seems not much has happened with Apps for a year now. dead?
I don't know what the status
I don't know what the status of trying to promote more Panopoly Apps is, but I do know there are more Panopoly-based distros out there now that have apps support. Kalamuna has been building up a Panopoly-based distro called Hotsauce that ties into an App Server to help us spin up projects faster, the docs on Apps aren't super great, but it's all doable.
MIght be able to point you to some docs if that's a blocker.
CEO @ www.thinktandem.io, the Lando guys
Apps is an idea with a lot of promise! But is finished...
The idea of Apps is really cool and I think has a lot of promise! Unfortunately, the Apps module is unfinished and there are parts of the current implementation that aren't great. It appears as though development on it has stalled (the last commit is from 2013-07-26).
When Panopoly first adopted Apps, development was much more active and the hope was that it'd get finished in short order. That didn't happen. :-/ At this point, if we want the idea of Apps to come to fruition we're going to need to find someone who's willing to take ownership of it and pick up development. Any volunteers? ;-)
As far as the Apps on the Panopoly App server, we currently only include these:
However, we (the Panopoly maintainers) would be happy to discuss adding more community created Apps!
If we had a pool of really useful community Apps that were actually getting used, it'd make advancing the Apps module a higher priority for everyone involved...
Apps in Open Atrium
I also want to get Apps working for Open Atrium 2. The Apps module definitely has issues and I'm not sure what approach we will take yet. For OA2 I need the ability to update Apps and also for an App to apply patches to modules. Examples are the oa_mailhandler and the oa_ldap which are rather complicated to install currently and would benefit from an App approach.
Definitely interested in following opinions on this. Don't really care what we call it, but some way to bundle a collection of modules, config, patches, etc and easily enable/disable the bundle (at install time or later) is what we need for OA2.
Not sure what timescale this will happen, but it's on my roadmap.
That's awesome! Integration with 'drush make'?
That's awesome!
I think some integration with 'drush make' (or minimal support for the .make file format) could help Apps get to the next level. There is an open issue about switching from the Apps manifest format to just parsing .make files:
https://drupal.org/node/1905718
And if it could also apply patches from .make files, then it'd meet most of your requirements listed above!
The other main missing things from the current implementation is doing updates. I think now you get a "comming soon" message. :-) But my feeling is that would be relatively easy since it can already install new modules from scratch. The original developers may just have not gotten around to it.
Anyway, let me know when you start looking at using Apps in Open Atrium!
File permissions?
Will the use of make and patching in an App have adverse knock on effects and requirements for the filesystem permissions of the module folders on the server making the system more fiddly to potentially get set up ?
No worse than Apps currently
I don't think using 'drush make' or patching the downloaded dependencies would make file permission setup any worse than with Apps currently. However, I think there are additional file permission related concerns that Apps needs to take into account, although, I'm not personally really familiar with them given that I've only minimally used Apps.
Potentially. That is why
Potentially. That is why Apps have been difficult in the past (and required obscure FTP configuration, etc). However, Drupal 7 has a mechanism for updating modules from the UI that should be able to be used for Apps. Also keep in mind that permissions may be looser on the initial install since it is assumed that to be a development environment. You likely won't be able to (or want to) update/patch directly on a production server with more limited permissions.
Non technical people/users
Non technical people/users would probably try out an app click-to-install on a dev environment to test it, and then try to click-to-install again on the production environment once they are happy.
This wouldn't involve adding code to git and deploying it to the production environment -- mainly because non technical people probably have no clue about that sort of process.
So i believe the need for update/patching on a production server using apps may be required.