Understanding Nothing

FireCore is much harder to actually set up than it should be. Once it’s all configured for a site it’s wonderful (as we’ll see later), but actually getting to that point is much too complex. There’s a whole range of things that need to be remembered: configuring the database, adding the requisite controls to the web server config files, setting up the directory structure for the templating system, creating the basic Perl subclasses for this site, setting up the revision control systems etc, etc.

This ends up taking at least half a day, and there’s always things that get forgotten or being done not quite right. Unfortunately we can’t even use a deferred install model where each bit only gets set up as it’s needed, as all of these are needed from the outset. We really need to find a way to automate this as much as possible. Most of it’s just cut’n'paste’n'tweak anyway, replacing the domain names and paths with the correct values. Something that asks a few pertinent questions and then just goes and makes everything happen could reduce this sequence to a matter of minutes rather than hours.