Add-on Development with Themes and Git

Question

I'm wondering how add-on devs who's add-ons have themes use Git? For example, the way I do things now is to just make my add-ons repo the core folder; eg, securitee or ct_admin within the third_party directory will contain the .git folder.

This doesn't work with themes though since those are stored in a completely separate directory and path than the core add-on code.

I was thinking I may need to have a completely stand alone installation of ExpressionEngine for each add-on and just use a .gitignore file to only allow the add-on files. This sounds over complicated though so I'm hoping to avoid this.

Any other ideas?

Answer 1

I always lay my add-ons out to match the directory structure of a default ExpressionEngine install. For example, check out Freemember on github. I think this makes it most obvious for customers downloading the add-on (believe it or not we used to get questions about where to copy the files to).

In Store, my git directory structure looks like this:

• /system/expressionengine/third_party/store
• /themes/third_party/store
• /Makefile etc (which I don't include in zip distribution)

I clone this git repo into my Dropbox folder, which sits in /Users/adrian/Dropbox/Dev/store

The final trick is simply to symlink your local EE install to your add-on directory. For example, (assuming your are using Max OS, Linux, or any other unix-based OS), to create links from my Dropbox folder to my EE install at ~/Sites/storedev:

cd ~/Sites/storedev/system/expressionengine/third_party
ln -s ~/Dropbox/Dev/store/system/expressionengine/third_party/store ./

cd ~/Sites/storedev/themes/third_party
ln -s ~/Dropbox/Dev/store/themes/third_party/store ./

Also, since you're using git for add-on development, I highly recommend checking out git flow for managing your different feature branches and releases.

Answer 2

I personally store the addons in a central "code" folder and then symlink the addons' third_party and themes folder to my sandbox folder. This way the git folder contains both system and themes addon folder.

Answer 3

I set this up by creating a "themes" directory inside my main repo. For instance with ProForm, my directory structure in development actually looks like this:

~/public_html/ee/third_party/proform/
__notes/
__static/
config/
docs/
language/
libraries/
models/
plugins/
templates/
tests/
themes/
views/
config.php
ext.proform.php
index.html
mcp.proform.php
mod.proform.php
README
tab.proform.php
upd.proform.php

I have multiple directories like this, one for each add-on that I write. Each of these is it's own git repository.

Notice that there is a directory here named "themes". This doesn't actually end up in this location within my produced ZIP files, but is just here to keep everything in one place within the repository.

I create a shared themes directory which contains soft links into each add-on:

$ cd ~/public_html/ee
$ mkdir themes
$ cd themes
$ ln -s ~/public_html/ee/third_party/proform/themes ./proform

This directory ends up with a single linked themes directory for each add-on.

I then have multiple EE installations, one for each point release that I test with. These go into directories such as

~/public_html/ee231
~/public_html/ee252

Within each of these, I go to it's system/expressionengine/ directory and create a soft link to the main third_party directory above:

$ cd ~/public_html/ee252/system/expressionengine
$ rm -rf third_party
$ ln -s ~/public_html/ee/third_party ./third_party

I then create a link to the themes directory which itself contains the soft links into each add-on:

$ cd ~/public_html/ee252/themes
$ rm -rf third_party
$ ln -s ~/public_html/ee/themes/third_party ./third_party

This way, I have all of my add-ons 1) in their own repos, 2) with a simple layout including the theme directory and 3) available for easy testing in all my supported EE versions.

Edit: I should also note that I use a build script which assembles the actual add-on directories into the expected structure prior to zipping them up - for example, for ProForm this is:

1. Removes all directories that start with __
2. Moves the root into {zip_base}/system/expressionengine/third_party/proform
3. Moves the themes/ directory into {zip_base}/themes/third_party/proform

Finally, I also manage all of this using the excellent git-flow strategy. My build script will produce a ZIP file using this logic from any point release tagged by git-flow, and will automatically include reusable libraries or other bits that I need to assemble (such as building static documentation HTML from sources, including ProLib, etc.).