Using profiles to replace mods

Status as of 2012

Mods is code in SVN: http://tikiwiki.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/tikiwiki/mods/trunk/
Most of the mods are abandonware and most of the good stuff was merged into core a long time ago but there are a handful of useful/maintained mods which are not in core because of licensing
Mods can't deal with versioning
Mods can't deal with translations
The Mods installer hasn't been improved in years and it's unlikely someone will step up.
Mods installer can't work in some places because of file permissions
- For themes, download links are provided at themes.tiki.org pointing to the theme archive at the Sourceforge repository, for people that can't install via the mods admin. But this entails downloading and then uploading the files so is more trouble than an installation via mods admin or profiles.
One thing the mods are used for fairly actively is themes that can't be included in the Tiki package due to license conflicts. On the theme creation/maintenance side, it has been good to use SVN for the versioning function. I hope this would continue with profiles (via wiki history?) or be improved, as there is a lot of redundancy in the current system (full set of files for each theme for each Tiki version, even though sometimes there is little change).

The Idea
Mods is a packaging/distribution tool for files managed in a SCM (SVN). Instead, profiles could be used to deploy and wiki pages could become the SCM, with a nice Web-based source code editor

No change
The license of the content can be GPL because the user installs themselves

Contributors can contribute via the browser (especially interesting for translators)
We would be using maintained code
Regarding themes, module configuration is an increasingly important aspect of theme-specific layout and function, and so it would be great to use a profile to apply the module configuration of a new theme. If this profile could also contain or enable the transfer of CSS files and background images, etc., that would nicely put everything in the same installation process.

Challenges

Translations
How to sync SVN with the wiki? Translation branching strategy How does get strings and other tools need adapting?

Binaries
How to deal with binaries? Profiles could be improved to handle binairies Tiki_logo_in_base_64 was made from http://www.greywyvern.com/code/php/binary2base64

File permissions
mods has a web installer PluginArchiveBuilder can generate the zip on demand of a bunch of files and we let people install themselves if file permissions are an issue

Long term
We could imagine moving translations completely to this, but we would need to upgrade our scripts

Related
To Mods Or Not To Mods

History