Taking the step from personal to distributed

I keep creating scripts that other people want to use… In creating them, I basically did whatever I needed to to bend them into shape to do what I wanted… In order to distribute them to others, I pretty much have to set up everything myself… Obviously, this creates problems – even people who know me have a hard time giving me root access to their mysql db and such…

So what I’d like to see is a discussion of guidelines on how to package your php/mysql solutions for distribution so that it’s easier on the other end to get them up and running.

Part of this would be proper coding and commenting to begin with, I’m sure… But scrubbing existing code is a part of it as well. Are there any helpful functions, code bits, etc that ease the process? Any other helpful hints on how to accomplish this?

One thought on “Taking the step from personal to distributed

  1. Topic: Taking the step from personal to distributed
    I wish I could help. I’m ashamed to say it (as I love the open source community) but I have yet to distribute any of my own projects. I contribute to established projects, but I have no clue what is involved in designing an easily distributable system. I’ve seen a couple of systems (phpBB and geeklog come to mind…I wonder why) that have built "installers" into their code. They will ship an install script that prompts for a mysql user/password (that the installer did have to create manually) and whatever else it needs and it takes it from there.

    This aproach scares me as you are "vulnerable" while that install script is there ( especially in upgrades, for example) but it can be a lot easier than manual upgrading. 😉

    Anyone with some real knowledge in this area??

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