[development] Defining additional search paths for modules?

[Justin Davis]

Thank you for the quick response.

I've been using symlinks thus far, but would like to use something that I could manage either through the admin interface or the settings.php file. In theory, if it were a module with a config interface, I could allow the sub-site administrators to enable or disable blocks of modules without giving them write access to the filesystem.

One of our goals/requirements is to manage all modules centrally & prevent site admins from potentially installing an unmaintained or unpatched module. Unfortunately this means that each site's admin/build/modules page has a significant load time and with enough modules/categories listed to hinder an admin's ability to quickly find something suited to a specific task.

On Nov 16, 2009, at 1:15 PM, Matt Chapman wrote:

> I would go low-tech and just create symlinks to sites/all/modules-advanced
> in each of the desired sites/sitename/modules . For mor etech, maybe write a
> shell script to add & remove these links automatically from a config file,
> if frequent maintenance is required.
> 
> -Matt
> 
> 
> On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 10:55 AM, Justin Davis
> <justindavis at mail.utexas.edu>wrote:
> 
>> Hello All.
>> 
>> My apologies if this belongs in "support" rather than "development".
>> 
>> I am managing a multi-site drupal installation and would like to be able to
>> offer groups of modules to a sub set of our sites without having to have
>> them installed in each sites/sitename/modules folder.
>> 
>> Basically, there are some advanced and developer modules that my more adept
>> users need but that I would rather not be available to some of our novice
>> site managers.
>> 
>> Ideally, I would be able to define something in the settings.php that told
>> drupal to look in:
>> 
>>   sites/all/modules
>>   sites/all/modules_advanced
>>   sites/sitename/modules
>> 
>> The only possible solution that I've found would be to create a custom
>> module that defined it's own "module_rebuild_cache" (maybe
>> "extra_module_rebuild_cache" or such) that used a slightly modified
>> "drupal_system_listing" that would be able to look outside of
>> "sites/all/modules" and "sites/sitename/modules"
>> 
>> Does this make sense? Has anyone else come across a similar issue?
>> 
>> Thank you kindly,
>> Justin Davis
>> Liberal Arts ITS
>> University of Texas at Austin
>> 




--
Justin Davis
Liberal Arts ITS Sr. System Analyst
justindavis at mail.utexas.edu