Hi Edwin,

I've been studying the 'Tools' option in JMS and I have a few questions (using Joomla! 1.7.3):

1) I do not see any option to re-install an application so if I want to update the application I execute the 'uninstall' from the slave site and then I execute the 'propogate to children' on the master site. This seems to achieve the result of a re-installation however I just want to double check that this is the correct method?

2) When I try to update the Jomsocial configuration by "re-installing" the component I click to 'uninstall' on the slave site and I DO NOT check the 'overwrite' box and then I click to 'propogate to children' on the master I also DO NOT check the 'overwrite' box.

However on the slave site the component is reset to the configuration of the master and seems to be overwritten. E.g. I created a new Jomsocial Group on the slave and I created a new Jomsocial Group Category on the master. After I "re-installed" the Jomsocial component then the new Jomsocial Group Category was correctly create in the slave BUT the new Jomsocial Group on the slave was deleted.

Please can you explain what I've done wrong here? If the field 'overwrite' was left unchecked then surely the configuration data in the slave will remain?

3) I have a component that displays 'extension without tables' and I tried to un-install in the slave and then propogate to children from the master (after I updated the configuration in the master). The configuration was not however updated in the slave site. Does this mean I need a custom job to add these extensions to JMS compatibility?

Thanks for your assistance with this.

1) There is no re-install in the JMS Tool menu.
If you want to re-install an extension over the extension one, you can go in the back-end of the slave site and proceed with the joomla / extension / installation.

2) If you uninstall with the JMS Tool, this will delete all the JomSocial tables with all the current content.

After, when you re-install, this copy the JomSocial table that are present in the master (or template) depending on your choice.

3) If you have created your own components that have MySQL tables and that you would like to have their definition added in the JMS tools, we can effectivelly create a plugin for such specific components with our billable support.

If you just want to install the component in a slave site, you can always go in the back-end of the slave site and install the extension as usual. This will call the specific extension installation script that probably create the MySQL tables for this extension.

Hi Edwin,

1) Then what is the best current method to upgrade extensions? If we have hundreds of slave sites we cannot manually go into each slave site to re-install a specific extension.

2) If there is no answer to 1) above then is there a way to 'push' the upgraded master extension or updated configuration to the slave sites (with the option to overwrite or not overwrite the slave site configuration)?

e.g. 1: we may have upgraded community builder and also added a new profile field. Could we push the upgrades and new profile field to all slave sites but retain the slave configuration and user information?

e.g. 2: we may have upgraded or changed the configuration of a plugin. Could we push the updated plugin to all the slave site and overwrite the previous plugin?

3) If JMS Tools says 'extension without tables' then what does this actually mean? My understanding is that the extension was properly installed during the slave site setup however JMS cannot install/uninstall the extension after this fact. Is this correct?

Thanks and regards.

1) If this is an upgrade that mean impact the DB layout and DB content then sorry, the JMS tool menu is not able to execute and process the specific stuff that might be present in the installation package of each extension.

There is no choice to apply the upgrade (or migration) manually in each websites.

2) If you accept to lose the data, you can always uninstall and re-install.
When sharing the content, this is not a problem to uninstall - reshared that is working is most frequent cases. The only limitation concern the case of "partial sharing" when an extension share only parts of the tables (not all the tables).
The Tool is not able to proceed with partial sharing.

Modules and plugins are generally not impacted as they does not really own the data.
This is the component that own the data.


3) This meam that JMS tool does not have the description of this extensions.
This mean that we never reviewed the extension and therefore that we never provided to JMS the description of which MySQL tables are used by this extension.
When you have such "extension without tables description" for a component, it is highly probable that the extension will not work as JMS will not copy the table (as they are not defined).
In this case, the only way to install the extension is to go in the back-end of the slave site and re-install the extension to let the author installation processing create the MySQL tables required by the extension.

When you have such message for a module or plugin, it can generally be ignored (if and only if) when the component is correctly installed and has a description of the MySQL tables.

Hi Edwin,

I appreciate your detailed response.

1 & 2) I'm a bit confused by your answer that JMS cannot 'update' extensions after upgrades or configuration changes. I may have miss-understood that a key feature of JMS was to easily create, manage and maintain extensions from 1 central location (i.e the master website).

Is it possible to build an extension or plugin for JMS that will allow us to 'push' extension updates (both database and file updates) to the extension in the slave site without overwriting the current slave site configuration data (i.e. re-install the extension from the master)?

3) I will compile a list of extensions that need to be included in the JMS table descriptions.

Thanks and regards.

i am confused about this too... i meant this was the advantage of jms: just install and manage one joomla installation. i use 15 copies of the master site. in each site the joomla installation and extensions have to be the same, only content articles and users are different. so it is not possible to achieve this by jms???