Have you thought of turning the problem round?

Create a reference site will all that stuff already in place. Then for each project, clone the reference site (either by hand or Backup Voodoo), so you never need to start from a fresh install.

There will still be site specific settings to make and you will need to change the marketplace connection and assign licences, but all the donkey work will already be done. The other stuff will be site specific whichever way you do it.

EDIT. This would also be easier to maintain, as you won't have a process specific set of code to revise with each change. Just change the reference site and make a new clone.

That's a good point. Also, have you looked into the "starting point" packages in c5?

James

I have fought with 'Starting Points' and I have to say they aren't quite 'ready for prime time'. They crash often and not very gracefully so debugging is tough. It's a great concept with lots of potential but I'm not sure the core team has spent much time on it lately.

Not surprised to hear this. I looked at it a few versions ago and it was quite lacking.... very much "made to order" for a specific purpose....

Thanks for your suggestion JohntheFish but in my opinion installing a package that has everything included is much easier than cloning a 'template-site'.

It's a good idea though!

I don't have syntax for importing images, but most of everything else that you need is documented in the package controller for this addon I wrote:

http://www.concrete5.org/marketplace/addons/c5-boilerplate...

It's designed to help developers get a jumpstart on things exactly the way you are needing. You could modify it to work with your base system, and then customize as needed on a site-by-site basis if any of them need different configurations.

I need to modify one aspect of it though, hoping to have that deployed tonight or tomorrow. The installation of page types deletes the page type if it exists and then re-adds it so that the package is associated with it. That causes issues when upgrading, because then your pages don't have a page type at all, and you can't edit properties because of a PHP error.

The change I mentioned has been deployed in the c5_boilerplate package.

You are right, your package do almost all I'm asking for.
Why I haven't found about it before?

Anyway, I already contacted a developer who might get this done 3 times faster than me using c5-boilerpalate.

If I were a better programmer and had more time available I'd use your package :-D

Take a look here:http://www.concrete5.org/marketplace/addons/basic-package-for-devel...

It has a lot of automatic process when it is installed or upgraded

This looks promising! I'll install it in a test site to have a better idea of what it can do.

Cheers!

Thank you for your words!
Feel free to contact me if you need more feedback about it.