Major Description
One of the principles of OODT Balance is that it should be possible to drop in modules with minimal configuration. One thing that currently frustrates this is occasional the need, in a module's configuration file, to know the actual install path or url of the module. Introducing a limited set of basic "environment variables," which would be evaluated just prior to parsing the module config file, would remove the need to know, a-priori, where the module has been installed.
For starters, the following "environment variables" should be available:
[MODULE_PATH] should expand/evaluate to the file system path of the module
[MODULE_ROOT] should expand/evaluate to the url base of the module
[MODULE_STATIC] should expand/evaluate to the url base of the module's static assets directory (css, js, img, etc)
These "environment variables" can then be used in module configuration files wherever absolute paths/urls would otherwise have been needed.