A SOBI2 cloning tool for Windows

Welcome to Help

DESCRIPTION: ============ The SOBI2 clonig tool for Windows is a simple little program to help you preapare for installation a second copy (a clone*) of the great SOBI2 component for Joomla! along with modules/plugins/templates for it. It can produce a whole clone in batch mode. The home of this project is : http://sourceforge.net/projects/asobi2clonewin/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- * A "clone" shall be considered the bundle of the component/modules/plugins/templates. LICENSE: ======== It is free software, licensed under the Free Software Foundation's GNU GPL. A copy of the license can be obtained from here: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html GNU/GPL HISTORY: ======== A tool for cloning SOBI2 for *NIX-based systems exists, but still there are quite many people that would not be able to use it because of having to stay with Win32 for some reason or another. For them the only choice was to follow some forum instructions (which I have done too!) and do the whole thing by hand. It's not difficult after all, but it involves some batch file renaming tool and some text search & replace tool installation, running them both and setting some criteria for renaming/replacement, zipping and unzipping. It's not neccessarily hard to do, but it's tedious, boring and error-prone. I myself need a tool like that for my job kust because it looks like there will have to be quite many SOBI2 instance on the project I am working on, this is why I wrote this little tool. The program is written in Delphi 7, using some free 3rd party components and SQLite3. ABOUT CLONING SOBI2: ==================== SOBI2 is a Joomla! component and as such you cannot install and use a second copy of it. Still there are scenarios where you need a second (a third, ...) SOBI2 component for different purposes. The same applies to all the SOBI2 "companion"-extensions like modules and plugins, since having a second copy of the SOBI2 component itself wouldn't be of great use. Here is where "cloning" comes to rescue. This involves some massive renaming of file names and text replacement in these files - the ones, contained in the ZIPped distributions of the SOBI2 component and it's companions. If it's all done right you will be able to install your parallel SOBI2-bundle instance and have it available to use from your Joomla! Administrator panel the usual way. In Joomla!'s backend menu you will see besides your SOBI2 components/modules the newly created ones, which shall be displayed as whatever you named your clone. WHAT THIS TOOL DOES AND WHAT IT DOESN'T: ======================================== This tool DOES NOT clone an installed instance that you might already have. Neither can it clone your installed and configured SOBI2 plugins, neither your categories and entries and whatever settings. What you CAN do with it is to just grab the latest SOBI2 component (the ZIP file, looking something like "com_sobi2-RC2.9.2.4.j15.zip") and all the modules/plugins/templates for SOBI2 that you need and "re-create" a modified copy of them so that you can install them on a Joomla! system which already has an instance of SOBI2 installed. INSTALLATION: ============= The tool does not need an installation. The EXE file is the program itself. USAGE: ====== There is really nothing to explain. Just run and follow the steps. You can clone a single SOBI2 component (or a module or a plugin) or groups of them at once (batch mode). If you forget to clone a module (or something) you can clone it later, just remember to give it exactly the same clone name as you gave to the SOBI2-bundle you have already cloned. Or you can just HOW IT WORKS: ============= It just unzips the source SOBI2 installation ZIP files in a temp directory. Then it renames all files that have 'sobi', 'SOBI' or "Sobi" in their names. Then it opens each file from the archive and searches and replaces every occurence ot the same within the text of the files. Finally it packs back everything into a ZIP archive which is actually your SOBI2 clone that is ready to be plugged into Joomla!

Hi Georgils, I downloaded and tried to run this but I didn't seem to be able to get it to work at first. I think the reason was because I used "sobi" in my clone name (ie. I tried sobi2_clone, sobiclone etc..). This resulted in the program not responding at step3, presumably because it got itself in a loop? If this is correct maybe you could add this to your instructions and/or prevent the entry of "sobi" in the clone name entry box. Apart from that it seemed to work fine....thanks for the app. Cheers, Brent

Hi, Brent, and many thanks for your feedback. It is the only way to make me feel that my tool is of any use to anyone and that it's living its own life. This I find really important and again - thank you for spending the time to write back. Honestly right now I have no idea what might have been messed up. As far as I remember there weren't any naming convention restrictions (the name of the clone should be irrelevant), which means you found a bug. Which means I'll have to investigate and see what can be done. If I can't fix it I can surely include the warning in the help file as you suggest. Anyway what you give me is a good point to start from. Best regards, Georgi