[TYPO3-templavoila] Static Data Structure Wishlist

[Jeff Segars]

Hey guys,
I've finally been able to dive into Static Data Structures and have a 
couple small enhancements that might be worth discussing. I'm happy to 
write the code for them, but would like a little feedback before I get 
too far along.

As a little background, I'm working on building some automation and 
backend UI for Ron Hall's TV Framework. The goal is to get most of Ron's 
work into static files within an extension so that updates can more 
easily be managed and templates can be easily distributed as extensions. 
Static Data Structures are of course a big part of this :)

The current implementation of Static Data Structures in TemplaVoila has 
specific DS paths for pages and FCEs. When a TO assigns a static DS, the 
entire path (relative to the TYPO3 root) is saved in the database. I'm 
wondering if it would be better to only save the filename so that a 
change to the overall DS path doesn't require saving each record again.

As part of the work for Ron's TV Framework, we'd like to include all of 
the Data Structures inside an extension.  With the current code, I can 
set TV to look for data structures inside the extension directory and 
everything works as expected. The only downside to this is an end user 
can no longer create their own static data structures because our 
extension has hijacked the path.  It seems like an easy solution to this 
would be to allow extensions to notify TemplaVoila of files (or 
directories) where static data structures can be found in addition to 
the existing path that TemplaVoila already reads from.

The two requests together would leave us saving the following strings in 
the DB and the ability to share data structures as extensions while 
still using custom data structures on a per-site basis.

STATIC:My Custom Data Structure.xml
EXT:templavoila_framework/datastructures/F1A.xml

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Jeff