Building and maintaining customized versions of OpenPetra

Purpose

Every organisation is different, so there cannot be one OpenPetra installation for all. It might work for smaller charities, for one country, but for bigger offices the default version of OpenPetra is not sufficient.

There must be a standard way to accomplish this, which will ensure that updates from upstream can be used in the customized version, and local improvements can be merged back into upstream if they would benefit other organisations as well.

Rules

• Never change a code file directly
• Changes to the code that benefit everyone must be merged into to upstream
• Custom files must be clearly identifiable, either by a special sub directory called "custom", or by file extension ".my"

Customizing files

Build files

• The default config file for OpenPetra.build is stored in eg. OpenPetra.build-sample-win.config
• Usually, the file is copied to OpenPetra.build.config, and that file is not committed to the repository, since every developer will have different settings in that file.
• For a defined environment in an organisation or if the repository is only used by one developer, you can commit the file OpenPetra.build.config.my to your local repository, which will be picked up instead of OpenPetra.build.config

Configuration files

• The default configuration files are stored in the format Client.config.sample.
• Customized configuration files should be stored in the format Client.config.my, and will be picked up by the nant tasks which build the installers.

Navigation files

• the default navigation file is csharp\ICT\Petra\Definitions\UINavigation.yml
• Currently, if there is a navigation file UINavigation.yml.my, the installers will use that file instead of the default UINavigation.yml file.
• In the future, it should be possible to derive from UINavigation.yml and to specify only changes to that file, both additions and omissions.

Translation files

• Translation files are stored in the directory i18n, eg. de-DE.po
• Texts can be overwritten to reflect the use of organisation specific terms. Such files with only the different texts are stored in eg. i18n\de-DE.po.my
• When running nant translationCompilePOFile, all language files (*.po) in i18n will be converted to a GNU Gettext resource dll, and the contents of *.po.my files will overwrite the specified texts per language.

Plugins

TODO

Building a release

• TODO build a release for server
• TODO build a release for client
• TODO archive tar.gz file for building future patches
• TODO build a patch for the client