Packages

When it comes to organizing, reuse and share your code, packages are a great way to allow you to do this. They can contain all sorts of code like models, third-party libraries, configs and so on. Packages also allow you to extend the core without messing up your app/classes directory. To clarify what packages are, here are the "is" and "is not" on packages.

Packages...

are a great way to organize your code,
supply a place to keep third party libraries,
allow you to extend other packages without messing with someone's code,
a place to extend fuel without messing with core files.

But..

packages do not map to the URL,
and are not approachable through HMVC requests

Installing packages

Installing packages can be done manually and through oil. To install manually download the package source and place it into your package directory (default in fuel/packages).

To actually be able to use your it you must either add it to always_load in app/config/config.php or use Package::load().

Creating packages

To help people understand what you are doing it's best to structure your package like so:

/packages
    /package
        /bootstrap.php
        /classes
            /your.php
            /classes.php
            /here.php
        /config
            /packageconfig.php
        /and_so_on

Every package is expected to have a bootstrap.php located at the base of the package. Use the bootstrap to add the package namespace (to global if you wish). And add the classes for better perfomance.

// Add namespace, necessary if you want the autoloader to be able to find classes
Autoloader::add_namespace('Mypackage', __DIR__.'/classes/');

// Add as core namespace
Autoloader::add_core_namespace('Mypackage');

// Add as core namespace (classes are aliased to global, thus useable without namespace prefix)
// Set the second argument to true to prefix and be able to overwrite core classes
Autoloader::add_core_namespace('Mypackage', true);

// And add the classes, this is useful for:
// - optimization: no path searching is necessary
// - it's required to be able to use as a core namespace
// - if you want to break the autoloader's path search rules
Autoloader::add_classes(array(
	'Mypackage\\Classname' => __DIR__.'/classes/classname.php',
	'Mypackage\\Anotherclass' => __DIR__.'/classes/anotherclass.php',
));

Once you have your classes in place you can now start using them.

Note: if package namespaces aren't aliased to global you must supply it:

// If aliased to global just use
$instance = new Myclass;

// When not aliased to global
$instance = new Mynamespace\Myclass;