Facilitate deployment of fragments

• Type: Epic
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Completed
• Affects Version/s: None
• Fix Version/s: None
• Component/s: Fragment Administration, Fragments Toolkit
• Labels:
  • 7.3-ce-ga1
  • fc_19_12
  • fc_20_01
  • requested-by-webteam
  • required-for-webteam
• Epic/Theme:
  • Fragment_Developer_Experience
• Epic Status: To Do

Currently Liferay supports three ways to introducing new fragments into the system:

• Importing a ZIP of fragments (produced manually or with the Fragments Toolkit) inside a specific site: This is a good option for site administrators who want to add fragments to their specific site and don't have any permissions outside of them.
• Direct import from the Fragment Toolkit into a site: this is a good option for fragment developers as they are developing fragments, or for smaller site where these developers can deploy directly to production.
• Deployment of contributed fragment collections: This is a good option for automating deployment into a system just like it's done for custom modules. This option is used by Liferay itself for its out of the box products and its most useful to package additional fragments as part of a custom enterprise solution. Currently, all fragments deployed this way will be made available system wide (that is, for all virtual instances and sites).

The purpose of this story is to take one step further in facilitating the automating the deployment of fragments into a system. The main improvements proposed are:

1. Use the same format for deploying fragments as the one used for importing them. This will simplify its development and will allow using the Fragments Toolkit which provides a better developer experience including validation, preview, etc.
2. Allow deployment of fragment that should only be made available for specific Virtual Instances or Sites.
3. Allow web developers to choose whether fragments will be modifiable or not after deployment (and in that case what should be the behavior on re-deploy)