Symphony.

This may sound very n00bish, but I find the Enable/Disable/Uninstall system for extensions is not very clear at all. Specifically, I’ve noticed that if an extension has been enabled and then disabled, its legacy still “appears” in the backend, e.g. text formatters and special section fields of disabled extensions can still be used. It takes uninstalling the extension for them to actually not be usable anymore. I suspect this is some sort of a feature, but could someone kindly explain the rationale behind it? Couldn’t really find anything concrete in the docs…

Thanks as always, John

Yeah, it is a bit unclear in Symphony 2. However, the guys are hard at work on Symphony 3 where things are significantly more clear.

As to your issue, if I were to guess it’s because disabling it only stops you from adding the field to a new section. If it’s already in use on a section, disabling it would break Symphony so they’ve added this in to save it.

Also, if a database is altered after installing an extension, disabling that extension shouldn’t revert any changes. Of course it all depends on how you use the APIs, but I think it’s not smart to actually delete the data if the extension is just disabled.

For example, let’s say you install the Static Sections extension. If you disable it, every section made static keeps a static column in the database that just becomes meaningless to the system. If you re-enable the extension, Static Sections will still be able to access to every change you made since you installed it last time (i.e. it will see there is a static column with a stored value stored for each row)

Think of “disable” as a sleep mode, and “uninstall” as a real deletion.

(Correct me if I’m wrong)