Introduction to the Library Ecosystem

QCubed was built on a principle that the core distribution should be lightweight and extensible. A part of that vision is an easy-to-use library infrastructure. The library system has gone through a number of significant changes in an attempt to make a system that is flexible, but also compatible with future changes of the core. (Even a name change, libraries used to be called "plugins".)

The current library architecture relies on Composer for installation. Once you have Composer installed and working, installing libraries is a simple matter of executing the Composer "require" command. For example, to install the QCubed Bootstrap library, you would execute the following:

composer require qcubed/bootstrap

Once a library is installed, you can use Composer to monitor for updates to the libraries, and automatically install those updates. Simly execute composer update and all your libraries will be updated. See the QCubed Github page for a list of composer installable libraries.

Composer installs all files in a /vendor directory. It includes an autoloader, so you can immediately use library classes once they are installed, without the need to use include statements to include them.

QCubed includes a Library Manager component that lists out the libraries you have installed, and lets you access the example code included with them.