ginatrapani/ThinkUp — Issue #1169: ThinkUp is hard to maintain and upgrade
Author: markjaquith
Created: 2011-11-19 04:45:47+00:00
State: open

ThinkUp is a difficult application to maintain and upgrade. What I really like is to be able to have my web applications installed in pristine directories, direct from version control, or a zip upload. ThinkUp requires writable directories and customized files within its main application directory. That makes upgrading a delicate procedure. Each time, I have to remember what files are custom, what directories have to be recreated with what permissions. I'd love to be able to just update the core files and be done.

This could be done by having ThinkUp look up one directory for a config file if one is not found in the application directory (if you do that, you might consider making the name of the config file more distinctive like `thinkup-config.inc.php`). The config file could also specify paths for a cache directory which could contain all files the application needs to write to disk for caching or for other purposes. With the config file and the cache directory out of the application directory, upgrades will be as simple as deleting the directory and uploading the new one.

Integration with another Git repo would also be nice. Unfortunately, ThinkUp has a bunch of other stuff in its main directory and has the application in a subdirectory. This would make using it as a Git submodule rather cumbersome, as Git does not allow you to check out a subdirectory of a repo. I'm not sure what to advise here.