English Design handbook

How to share a skin within my company?

Once you will have designed a corporate skin, say, my_own_skin, you may have to install it at several servers. What are the available methods for such a deployment?

[title]Push the skin manually[/title]

This solution is really simple. Open some FTP client software, connect it to each target server in your company, and push skin files to the adequate place (skins/my_own_skin, below the YACS installation directory).

Of course, this will have to be done again on each skin change.

If you have many servers, if you are foreseen many skin changes over time, or if you are a clever and lazy person, you would prefer to automate the update process.

[title]Put the skin into a reference store[/title]

You are wise, you have installed your own reference server to serve updates within your company.

The target of following handling is to integrate the corporate skin into this reference store.

Ensure that every PHP script in skins/my_own_skin has the keyword '@reference' in the top phpDoc comment.

Then push the directory, and its content, to the reference server. You will have to copy files twice, to achieve following fully-populated directories: - skins/my_own_skin and - scripts/reference/skins/my_own_skin

Also, create a one-time script to copy non-PHP files. You can derive this from an old script in scripts/run_once.

Copy the new one-time script to scripts/reference/scripts/run_once to ensure that it will be taken into account by remote servers.

Then browse the scripts index of the reference server and (re)build the reference store.

Any YACS server that will upgrade against the company reference server will automatically benefit from the new skin as well.