When it comes to organizing, reuse and share your code, packages are a great way to allow you to do this. They can contain all sorts of code like models, third-party libraries, configs and so on. Packages also allow you to extend the core without messing up your app/classes directory. To clarify what packages are, here are the "is" and "is not" on packages.
Packages :
* are a great way to organize your code,
* supply a place to keep third party libraries,
* allow you to extend other packages without messing with someone's code,
* a place to extend fuel without messing with core files.
But.
* packages do not map to the URL,
* and are not approachable through HMVC requests
Creating packages : To help people understand what you are doing it's best to structure your package like so:
/packages
/package
/bootstrap.php
/classes
/your.php
/classes.php
/here.php
/config
/packageconfig.php
/and_so_on
Every package is expected to have a bootstrap.php located at the base of the package. Use the bootstrap to add the package namespace (to global if you wish). And add the classes for better perfomance.
// Add namespace, necessary if you want the autoloader to be able to find classes
Autoloader::add_namespace('Mypackage', __DIR__.'/classes/');
// Add as core namespace
Autoloader::add_core_namespace('Mypackage');
// Add as core namespace (classes are aliased to global, thus useable without namespace prefix)
// Set the second argument to true to prefix and be able to overwrite core classes
Autoloader::add_core_namespace('Mypackage', true);
// And add the classes, this is useful for:
// - optimization: no path searching is necessary
// - it's required to be able to use as a core namespace
// - if you want to break the autoloader's path search rules
Autoloader::add_classes(array(
'Mypackage\\Classname' => __DIR__.'/classes/classname.php',
'Mypackage\\Anotherclass' => __DIR__.'/classes/anotherclass.php',
));
