More Packages

After having written a few packages I believe I now have it down cold. I started another one just a few hours ago and am already finished with it and had no problems at all this time. The latest package is escuccim/recordcollection which is a package with the code I use for my searchable database of vinyl records. Yesterday I did a package with the code for my online CV in it, so at this point this site is basically just the static pages and four Laravel packages. While it's a bit more complicated to make changes now because I need to go to the package code, alter it, then push it up to git and then composer update, I think the extra couple steps is well worth it in terms of maintainability and portability. My packages are largely self-contained, with their own views, controllers, models, etc. so I can just add them to a project and everything will (almost) magically work.

I don't really see much demand for a package like this for other people so I haven't thoroughly tested this one in projects other than my own, so it may not work properly out of the box. If you have a large record collection that you want to store online I would recommend Discogs.com. It has a lot more features and functions than my package does, but I don't have the time to go through each of my 2,000 or so records and add them to my Discogs collection and I've had most of mine in a database for about 15 years, so I'm sticking with my own for now. If I was starting over from scratch I'd probably put it in Discogs and then pull the data from their API to display it here.

My other packages are all tested and working on fresh installs of Laravel, so feel free to use them if you want. 

Update - I ended up testing the recordcollection package on an almost fresh install of Laravel and I fixed the issues I found, so it should be in mostly usable shape.

Labels: coding, laravel