Splitting up Zotonic in OTP apps - big changes coming!

5 July 2017

We are preparing a huge update to the 1.0-dev (aka master) branch. This update will make Zotonic compatible with Erlang OTP projects. All modules and sites become OTP applications.

This BREAKS ALL existing Zotonic-master installs!

And now for some Q&A.

What is changing?

All sites must become Erlang OTP applications
All modules must become Erlang OTP applications
Zotonic is being split up in different apps, for better re-use
All Zotonic parts are published as separate packages to hex.pm
Use the hex package manager for module installations
The zotonic umbrella project which can be used for core development
There will be separate “starter” projects for easy development
rebar3 templates for creating

In the coming days we will merge the OTP branch into master.

The pull request is: https://github.com/zotonic/zotonic/pull/1717

After this we will update with some missing pieces:

rebar3 templates https://github.com/zotonic/zotonic/issues/1737
hex for module installs https://github.com/zotonic/zotonic/issues/1742
user module/site handling with _checkouts https://github.com/zotonic/zotonic/issues/1743

After we added logging we can call it a release candidate.

What is the new structure of a site/module?

Template, css, js etc. all move into the priv directory.

All Erlang source files move into the src directory

Example:

    mysite /
        src /
            mysite.app.src
            mysite.erl
            controllers / 
                controller_test_foo.erl
            models /
                …
        priv /
            zotonic_site.config
            templates / 
                …
            lib /
                …

We will keep you updated