Lack of interest Make Core Functionality Modulated

[ZeWildGuy]

This is a pretty major idea, and possibly more suited to a 2.0 release, but I will suggest it anyway.

There are lots of suggestions for very good functionality, and there is a lot of very good functionality being put into XenForo, but there are a number of features that I personally won't use. Now my suggestion is to put core functionality into modules that can easily en downloaded and easily enabled/disabled.

This will allow the developers to add more of the functionality that users want, without bloating the core. And this will also allow for easy removal of features deemed unnecessary by different site owners.

But this could also easily be done with official add-ons and further improved with an automatic add-on installer.

 

[Boothby]

Which core functionality have you in mind, for example?

 

[ZeWildGuy]

Which core functionality have you in mind, for example?

Well, Brogan mentioned in another thread that he was never going to use the new smiley manager, so that could be put into it's own module. "Nice things" like that are the main features I think should be in their own module, and they can be used if wanted, and if not wanted, they won't just sit there, uselessly. And this will allow the developers to add new "nice things" that people want, but others might not want, without making the software too bloated.

 

[Chris D]

Hmm, it's important not to lose definition of the term bloat.

In my opinion it's ok for a Smiley Manager to be included and never used, as long as it has no performance overhead.

And that's surely what the definition of bloat is.

If I have 100 features in software that I will never use, and as a result each one of those has a performance overhead whether that be a couple of seconds extra load time, or additional queries, that is bloated software.

However, if I have 100 features in software that I will never use, and as a result of never using them I never see a degradation in performance, no additional queries, then I'd say that the software is not bloated.

It's also worth bearing in mind that it's rare for a feature not to have some sort of control be it a global option or permission that would effectively allow you to turn it off. I'd say that avoids bloat too.

Perfect example is the rich text editor. There may be people out there who consider that to be unnecessary and prefer the text only editor. It adds a bit of time on page load, a bit of extra bandwidth to load the JS etc. But you can turn it off. So, is it bloat? I think not.