There is dependency manager for PHP called Composer (see http://getcomposer.org/). It allows you to keep only main project code in repository and download all used libraries from GitHub when project is deployed to a server.
I see following benefits of using it:
- no need to invent the wheel, because we can use any library out there that fits our needs (need to check out library licensing though);
- no large svn checkouts (for developers), because all 3rd party libraries are managed by Composer and not in In-Portal repository;
- automatic 3rd party library upgrade, because Composer will take care of that;
- no need to have "root" access to a server, because Composer installs all libraries locally in project's
/vendor/folder.
To make this even more interesting I'm proposing to develop new In-Portal functionality (when possible) in a way of pluggable 3rd party library. Such libraries then can be reused even without In-Portal itself.
Separating In-Portal into Components
Right now there is a lot of code in In-Portal and it's modules. Codebase is separated into 2 groups:
- loosely coupled - code can work outside In-Portal (e.g. CurlHelper, ImageHelper)
- tightly coupled - code can't work outside In-Portal (e.g. ScheduledTaskEventHandler)