Packages

ProjectTemplate is not designed to help you write R packages. If you’re looking to do that, you should start by looking at the package.skeleton() function provided by the utils package. After that, you might consider looking into the devtools package that Hadley Wickham is developing.

If it’s not clear to you why ProjectTemplate isn’t meant to help you write your own package, here are some important ways in which a statistical analysis project differs from a package:

• A project is built around exactly one data set, while a package should work with many different data sets.
• A project is something specific: your goal is to learn a specific fact about the world from a specific data set. In contrast, a package should contain general purpose tools for analyzing many different data sets. For example, a package might contain code to perform linear regression, while a project would contain code that performs linear regression on a specific set of variables, such as height and annual income.