Making it easier to share a custom element library with co-workers

I work at a moderately large company, and we’re just starting to use ForeUI for quick UI prototypes. As such, we’re starting to build a library of custom elements representing components of website that are frequently used. Something that has become something of a challenge is sharing this library between multiple people in our group.

Currently, we have all of our custom elements on a network drive, and new people coming onboard with the software can import all of the elements. Unfortunately, ForeUI seems to move elements when you are importing them into a library, which is a pain in this environment. Regardless though, it would be really nice if you could bundle all of your custom elements into one file for ease of transporting and importing. In our case, we could say, “here’s our element library version 1.1”. Today we *could* ZIP up all the elements and store them that way, but it’s just a little less elegant.

Here’s the workflow that I’m imagining. Someone builds a library of custom elements, and puts them into a custom category. They choose File > Export Category, and it will produce a “my_category_v2.4ca” file (for example). They email it to someone else who goes to File > Import Category, picks the file, and they have a new category show up containing all of the custom elements from the first person. You can achieve the same result in today’s ForeUI, it’s just a little clunkier process.

Actually if you want to take this a step further, the way the Resource Sharing works now is pretty cool – just in our case, we’re doing only internal stuff so we would need that to be a local thing, not internet-wide (the internet doesn’t want our elements anyway, trust me!). If we could setup a folder somewhere on a shared drive that would act as a “server”, that would be great. Everything else with Resource Sharing could work the same – author name and upload date, a thumbnail of the element, ability to download elements or libraries directly into ForeUI. Just on a local, internal level instead of internet-wide.

In the environment that we have, making it easier to share custom elements would be a huge benefit so we can try to keep everybody on the same page.