Ensuring non conflicting components in a modular system
- by Hailwood
So lets say we are creating a simple "modular system" framework.
The bare bones might be the user management. But we want things like the Page Manager, the Blog, the Image Gallery to all be "optional" components.
So a developer could install the Page Manager to allow their client to add a static home page and about page with content they can easily edit with a wysiwyg editor.
The developer could then also install the Blog component to allow the client to add blog entries.
The developer could then also install the Gallery component to allow the client to show off a bunch of images.
The thing is, all these components are designed to be independent, so how do we go about ensuring they don't clash? E.g. ensuring the client doesn't create a /gallery page with the Page Manager and then wonder why the gallery stopped working, or the same issue with the Blog component, assuming we allow the users to customize the URL structure of the blog (because remember, the Page Manager doesn't necessarily have to be there, so we might not wan't our blog posts to be Date/Title formatted), likewise our clients aren't always going to be happy to have their pages under pages/title formatting.
My core question here is, when building a modular system how to we ensure that the modules don't conflict without restricting functionality?
Do we just leave it up to the clients/developer using the modules to ensure they get setup in a way that does not conflict?
