Moving baked in modules to plugins...

So, I've been using Nop since v1.5. Love it! However, every time I start a new site using it, I find myself having to strip out a lot of features to make it more lean.

Namely the Blog and Forums. I know you can turn them off, but I want the ability to completely remove them if a site doesn't want them. In comes plugins.

In 2.4, I make a fork (my own fork, not a mercurial fork) that removed the forums, blog, polls, news and created a bunch of plugins like a photo gallery, social media buttons ("like", G+, etc...), document repository, WP RSS feed, FB RSS feed and a few others.

Anyway, to the point. Each time a new release of Nop comes out, I'm hesitant to upgrade because I have to repeat the above steps of stripping some of the baked in goodies. I'm only one dude and this gets time consuming. I want to take advantage of the new features and have the option to upgrade existing sites, but because it's a fork, it makes it nearly impossible to make them compatible.

I'd love to give back to the project, but I'm not real sure where to begin with mercurial or what the process is to contribute. Is anyone interested in a leaner Nop with the forums, blog, polls and news sections extracted into plugins? If so, I'd love to tackle it! I'd need some guidance to the process, but it would make my life a lot easier (and hopefully others) if these items were extracted into their own projects.

So, are there more people interested in this, too? Is the Nop team interested in this? As mentioned I can take this on myself as most of the leg work is already done.

Lemme know and thanks for an awesome community!
-D

danewell wrote:
Hi danewell:
I understand your point of making the Nop cart more lean, but, just as a matter of curiosity, do you think that you really get a substancial gain in performance or reduction in consumed resources if you remove such features as forum, blogs, pools, news, and alikes?

I've noticed a difference although I haven't done scaled unit tests. Faster startup and less overhead in some areas.

I prefer a leaner app because I often let the merchants handle their own content. I don't want the blogs, forums, etc to even be there. So, I made them plugins. Now, clients that want the features, I just load them up.

It's not really a performance issue. More of a "I don't want to strip these out." feature.

Don't they make more sense as a plugin, anyway?

-D

I was actually thinking about this a couple of weeks ago when upgrading sites to 2.65.  There were a lot of css changes; many to functionality that my clients don't use - forums, blogs, etc.  (as per above :)
It's a bit painful to have to go through the merge process on my custom themes when new features (and thus new/updated css styles) are added.  Isolating those styles to the proposed respective plugins would help much in that regard.

Well, as mentioned, I'd love to contribute to get them extracted or even do it myself if it means it's that way for future iterations.

Whose ear do I pick to see about making it happen? I'm sure a lot of people would benifit from it.

-D

danewell wrote:
Agree 1000%

Andrei,
Would you please weigh in with some thoughts, comments, caveats, etc.?
Thanks

danewell wrote:

Dane...when you are referring to making your own plug-ins for the are you talking about badges to your accounts on G+, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.? If yes can to share the plug-in with the rest of us? I've been looking for a plug-in that will allow us to do that.

WP RSS Feed. I presume you are referring to WordPress blog. Are you allowing to let people subscribe to the feed, are you putting the feed in the sidebar or both?

MtnStreamGroup wrote:
The G+ and "Like" are URL domain based and that's what I've implemented for my sites. The simply display the number of people who've liked the domain. See the secondary white bar below the main nav here http://www.phenomoc.com/
MtnStreamGroup wrote:

Yes, I'm displaying the RSS feed in a side bar or main body area. I'm not displaying a "subscribe" feature but I'm 99% sure it doesn't involve a lot of logic.

My fork is of 2.4 and there may be some possible issues if you try to use them directly, so if you want to use my plugins you'll have to understand how to develop in Nop.

I'd love to implement them in future releases...  Like an AJAX proxy for calling remote URL's I've implemented.

danewell wrote:

Dane ... You have combined follow me and social sharing in the white bar. Typically, they aren't associated with each like they way you have it. With respect to the 'follow me' badges on the left, it would look better without the actual names of the badges/buttons. By now most everyone in the world know what those badges stand for.

I would agree with you that there should be a much easier way to put any number of social network badges on the site in nop, whether that is nop itself or a plugin. In either case it should be user-friendly and have a control panel in the content management section.