This thread discusses the Content article: Perfection And Joomla! 1.6

Really interesting post Anthony.

Would this lead you to recommend the removal of things like Banners, Weblinks and Newsfeeds from the core?

Personally, I would like to see them removed. Will I push to see them removed, no. But my view on it is that they don't belong there...

A thumbs up from me.

These components add unnecessary size without providing any essential functionality.

Well, some argue some use... And I'm not saying some of the things mentioned in your article, and the other article shouldn't be in the core. My real point is that everybody wants everything in it, and not everything belongs in it... Infact, IMHO, most things do not belong in it...

If there was an effort to remove Banners, Weblinks, and Newsfeeds from the core, I would be in favor of it. Banners may have had their day, but so many people use affiliate programs now that it's almost futile. Weblinks might be useful to some people, but it could survive on its own as a 3PD. Same with newsfeeds.

What makes much, much more sense to me is to completely whittle down the base CMS package to the minimum, and then add two absolutely critical features:

1) Ability to use a web-based GUI in the administrator to install extensions
2) The ability to package groups of extensions as a bundle (say, the 'blog' bundle)

Then we can ship a lean, mean publishing machine and it is dead simple for folks to quickly and easily add what they need to accomplish their specific goals.

Here's something to consider for the next big-ish release, user-definable content types complete with attributes. In the Plone vernacular they are called Archetypes, and a really good article can be found at DevShed that shows what the idea is all about:

http://www.devshed.com/c/a/Zope/Plone-Content-Types-With-Archetypes/

Plone has an advantage in the sense that it has an object database and we're still living in the relational world in PHP, but it sure would be cool to come up with a PHP-flavored approach.

You've been posting a lot of great content recently.

The question of what to take out in 1.6 would be one to sit down with a bunch of seasoned Joomla users / developers and discuss. Now that Joomla has established itself as one of the best, if not the best CMS, I agree that some of the legacy stuff in the core (just to show how flexible Joomla is out of the box) can be done away with. But this could go too far. XOOPS, for example, does not come with a module to create content. You have to download a 3rd party module for that. Same for the menu system. If somebody is not familiar with content management systems, the last thing they want to do is go hunting around, researching modules for basic functionality.

Here's a list of what I think could be dropped:

• Weblinks - There are much better options available than the core. Almost useless.
• Banners - Again, much better options from 3rd party extensions or something like OpenX.
• SEF - I was excited about the improvements for SEF with 1.5.1. sh404SEF is so much better, I'm just going to end up using that. However, the current iteration of SEF is useful, more like permalinks on WordPress. For people who just want simple SEF to define the path to their article, it is not bad. So maybe SEF is good to leave in as well as meta management.
• Caching - PageCache is much better. I like being able to set different cache times for different areas of the site as well as all the other options that are available. Caching for logged in users is good to have though, in addition to PageCache. Any chance PageCache is going to make it to 1.5 or 1.6? Hint hint, wink wink.
• News Feeds - This core component could go.
• Statistics - Very much can go.

Another thing I'd like to see are some efficiency improvements. There is a ton of white space that can be eliminated from the code. All that whitespace is data and increases the file size and load time for pages. I think most developers use color-coded code editors anyways, white-space is very unnecessary. It would also be great to see XHTML strict or 1.1 brought to the fore-front, not only for the core but for third-party extensions. Creating compliant code should be emphasized. Finally, all tables used for layouts should be eliminated. The core output should do away with table-based layout completely.

This is a provocative article Anthony. Maybe you could set up a poll to see which
core features Joomla users employ, and which they feel could be taken out. I'd love to see some data on that. Just don't use the poll module included in the core

Post edited by: undoIT, at: 2008/02/23 14:34

At Joomla Day USA West we were asked to discuss the question, who is Joomla for, users or developers?

The two questions, what is it for and who is it for are both great and necessary questions. At Joomla Day, the middle stance first voiced by Louis eventually grew very strong. Both sides, users and developers need equal attention.

It can be argued that Joomla, the CMS is for users where Joomla, the Framework stripped of all unnecessary extensions is for developers.

I personally would love to see a package of just the 1.5 framework made available in a downloads area to officially encourage development outside of the CMS box. Two obvious applications that have yet to be seriously approached by any Joomla developers are a CRM and a Project Management tool. And then of course there are the two applications desperately needed by the community - a blog and a forum.

Does Joomla the CMS have too much packaged in the core? Possibly. It would certainly make maintenance and future development a lot easier if it were stripped back to the absolute essentials for a CMS.

I think what I said was that Joomla! is for people

I tend to agree with Anthony here, the only exception being that it is nice to have sample data out of the box that shows a fully functioning site and it is helpful to show things like a few Web links and a poll on the front page. If it were uniquely up to me we would have a much more stripped down core but ultimately we have time.

Good post Anthony.

- Louis

Caching - PageCache is much better. I like being able to set different cache times for different areas of the site as well as all the other options that are available. Caching for logged in users is good to have though, in addition to PageCache. Any chance PageCache is going to make it to 1.5 or 1.6? Hint hint, wink wink.

I already submitted my white paper...

http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=500&t=267438

kdevine wrote:
I personally would love to see a package of just the 1.5 framework made available in a downloads area to officially encourage development outside of the CMS box.

This is an interesting idea that is used a lot in the Drupal world.

Developers such as Virtuemart already make packages with Joomla and extra plugins. Providing a stripped-down framework would certainly help people provide an "ecommerce Joomla", a "blogging Joomla", a "CRM Joomla" etc.

No point in having weblinks, banners or newsfeeds in a CRM system.

Post edited by: alledia, at: 2008/02/25 11:22

I personally would love to see a package of just the 1.5 framework made available in a downloads area to officially encourage development outside of the CMS box.


I don't know that I'm quite as gung-ho about this. If it isn't too difficult to extract the framework and provide it in some sort of usable stand-alone state, it certainly can't hurt. However, if this is going to take a considerable effort to do, I think it will end up as a distraction from improving the core functionality. This is especially true when you consider that there are so many PHP frameworks geared towards projects built from scratch.

I still use the 1.0 framework cause I am so familiar with it. When I create a new site one of the first things I do is go in to the generated DB change a lot of the components from iscore and the remove them like the banner, web links, etc ... so I work with a very clean system. They should have an install option like the sample data to install the basic components. So from install it could be a clean system, or if you want the common components then you can install them.

One of the things I like with vbulletin is the ability for hacks to be installed, it can do an eval of code at different locations, so if we had that in the core then you could add functionality with out having to modify the core files especially index.php