use-revolution Digest, Vol 80, Issue 16

[Mark Wieder]

Graham-

Tuesday, May 4, 2010, 6:45:12 AM, you wrote:

> I feel as if I've run afoul of the
> Church-of-we-don't-do-it-that-way/Denomination-rev/Sect-externals.

rotfl

> Mark, you asked why I considered mentioning setting the
> Preferences/Files & Memory/User Extensions. Because my two primary
> sources - Externals Lesson 2 (explicitly), and Shao Sean's revUp
> article on ssMacWindows (implicitly), told me to. But your response,
> and my testing, raises the question - what is it used
> for._______________________________________________

I'm getting back to this after wading through a day's worth of iPad
junk... it's getting so I dread dealing with my email anymore.

As Jacque has pointed out, there's a place for user plugin stacks and
such. Things that aren't part of the normal rev distribution.

For some reason this location isn't created when you install rev, so
you have to do it yourself. The first step is figuring out where you
want the folder to live. On Windows it's normally in "My Documents"
and called "My Revolution Studio" or whatever version you've got. On
OSX it's normally in your "Documents" folder and called the same
thing. You can call it and put it wherever you want, but I think it's
probably best to keep it simple and go with the defaults.

So you need to create this folder yourself.
Then you need to tell rev about it:
Go to rev's preferences under "Files & Memory", click the browse
button next to "User Extensions", and select the folder you just
created.
Rev will create various subfolders inside your user folder: docs,
Externals, Plugins, Resources.

You can put plugin stacks into the Plugins folder and externals into
the ...wait for it... Externals folder and they'll be accessible to
any stacks in the IDE. It's a much more flexible way of dealing with
third-party things than having to shoehorn them into the hierarchy of
the rev app folder structure itself. And less prone to messing things
up.

And... you can go back to a default state just by renaming your
Plugins or Externals folder to something else temporarily for testing.

-- 
-Mark Wieder
 mwieder at ahsoftware.net