General Questions about Fuel, and what to expect when upgrading

eriklharper

Right now I am in the discovery phase of evaluating Fuel as a development platform for a good many web projects that I have inherited that are all built with CodeIgniter. The websites are for bicycle sharing systems, and include front-facing public websites (i.e. www.capitalbikeshare.com) and back-end sites for administrative tasks and sub-sites like store.capitalbikeshare.com. I want to integrate all of these separate CI apps (since right now they are all running separate instances of CodeIgniter) into one environment on a single web server, and it seems that Fuel CMS will fit the bill for providing this integration.

For every bike sharing system, there is a front-facing website that takes membership orders, usually a store site that handles gift certificates and merchandise orders, and more apps to come that are back-end administrative stuff. Here are a couple questions I would like to throw out to everyone, in particular the developers of the project to get your take on my needs:

1) Is it possible to take CI apps running as a subdomain (such as store.capitalbikeshare.com) and implement them as a Fuel Module, still retaining the ability for the app to be accessed with a subdomain as opposed to a URL path like capitalbikeshare.com/store?

2) What can I expect when upgrading Fuel as new versions trickle down? It looks like there are a lot of files compared to the vanilla CodeIgniter installation and I just want to make sure that the creators of Fuel have thought through the upgrade process to minimize the work involved and the disruption that could occur with the custom code. What files/directories will have to be updated when a release comes out? Any files/folders within the application directory itself?

Thanks for any feedback you can provide that can help me evaluate this as a potential solution.

admin

With regards to your questions:
1) FUEL uses the HMVC Modular Extensions library and to my knowledge, there isn't an easy way at the moment to get subdomains to map to modules.(https://bitbucket.org/wiredesignz/codeigniter-modular-extensions-hmvc/wiki/Home)
2) With regards to the upgrade process, it is recommended that you check it out using git and use git to do any updates. FUEL does have files in the application directory. The controllers, models and views folders are not used (although there is a contact.php placeholder controller in there). However, most of the other folders contain files that have the potential to being updated.

That said, separating more code from the application directory is something we've thought about, but haven't been able to do at this point.