Better Package Browsing

Contents

CVS and SubVersion Import Support (GIT soon)

Recently the PHPClasses site started allowing authors to import their package files from SubVersion repositories. SubVersion is the second version control system to be supported. CVS was the first version control system that was supported.

GIT will be the next version control system to be supported. If you want to import packages from a GIT repository, please be patient because that is coming soon.

The Challenge of Listing Large Packages

Supporting these features brought up new challenges to the site. One of those challenges is the fact that packages imported from version control repositories may have much more files and directories than other packages which require their authors to upload files one by one. This fact made the listing of large packages very long and harder to browse.

Tab Based User Interface to Browse Package Directories

The way package files are listed was enhanced to deal better with large packages. Basically it provides a tab based user interface to browse package directories and sub-directories. This means that package directories will be listed as links to other tabs that present only the files and sub-directories in those directories.

The directory tabs are loaded immediately because the page already contains the files of all directories of a package. It just shows one directory tab at a time. This also addresses the requirement of having all package file page easily crawlable by search engines.

A package may still have single directories with many files and these will be shown in a single tab all at once. But for large packages with files distributed in multiple sub-directories, now the listings will not be so long as before.

Future Enhancements

This is just one improvement that was done to the package browsing pages. If you are using the JSClasses site, the PHPClasses brother site for JavaScript components, you may notice that this enhancement was already made available in the pages of packages listed in that site.

By the way, the JSClasses has just completed 1 year of age since its launch. A post was just released in the site blog to tell about the first JSClasses site anniversary as well about these browsing enhancements.

If you have developed interesting JavaScript objects, the JSClasses site really needs your help to grow faster and so make it as useful for JavaScript developers as the PHPClasses site is for the PHP developers. Please go there and read the JSClasses site first anniversary post, so you can learn how you can contribute and benefit from sending your contributions there.

But back to the future plans, another enhancement that is planned is to also display the contents of each file right in file listing of the package page, thus without page reloading. This will require some AJAX based interaction with the site server, as well some layout adjustments which will take some time to implement.

Other Browsing Enhancement Suggestions

Despite there are more enhancements to be made, the current enhancements were made available now in order to encourage you, the site users, to provide feedback as early as possible on current and future enhancements being planned.

So, it would be really useful if you could tell if you liked these enhancements or if you have suggestions to make it better. In that case, please post a comment to this article about any issues you found with current enhancements, as well any other improvement suggestions besides those mentioned about that will be implemented in the future.