Quoting from the Everything distro: What is a nodeball? A nodeball is a "package" of nodes for your Everything system. Nodeballs are somewhat similar to RPMs or DEB packages. They allow you to install specific functionality to your Everything system.

You can use the nbmasta utility to import nodes from and export them to nodeballs. It would be cool if we could somehow export the particularly interesting nodes from this server into nodeballs and then put them up on our own Everything servers, wouldn't it?

More news: first of all, there are additional nodeballs you need to get from everydev.com to get the really cool features. They are Chatterbox, Experience, and weblog. Do read about some of the gotchas here.

As I dissected these little morsels of joy, I discovered that they are simply hierarchies of directories containing XML (under ./nodes) and sqldump files (under ./tables). At the top level of each nodeball directory is an XML file named ME. I'm not sure what it does, because commenting out items from it doesn't prevent nbmasta from attempting to install them.

Nodeballs are distributed as single files with the .nbz extension, but I recommend expanding each one to a subdirectory of ebase/nodeballs (assuming your Everything source directory is named ebase which is the default). You can do this using tar with the xzf arguments. Nbmasta can open .nbz files directly... it can do lots of things, but I noticed sometimes you get errors unless you are at the top level ebase and the nodeball files are in a subdirectory of ebase/nodeballs. Confused yet? It will actually make more sense when you download it and play with it.

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