Thanks for your acknowledgement.johnjdoe wrote: Full ack! But the ideas with the "stub solution" are not bad at all guys ...
It is possible. But that would require the user to install the plugin in one of two directories, based on how it should be used. That's IMO not conforming to CMSimple's spirit to be simple.bjorn wrote: A new INCLUDE-ON-DEMAND module system could be parallel to the present plugin system.
Basically I agree with you. But consider the problems with existing extensions. I don't know how many use e.g. $c. If not all pages are read by rfc(), then $c won't be filled accordingly. So the extension may fail. And at least CMSimple classic and LE 3.4 need all the page headings to build up the TOC.bjorn wrote: But still CMSimple has two wasteful solutions we should try to do something about: The automatic including of all plugins every time and the big content.htm.
I'm conservative in this regard. Changes to CMSimple's core should remain compatible with the currently available extensions (plugins, addons, templates etc.) If major incompatible changes will be made, they have to be done as a totally new CMSimple version. And this version must be tagged explicitly as such. But this will only be reasonable, if many extensions will be changed accordingly. And this means lots of work must be done. IMO a major change can't be made in a short time. It must be prepared and discussed by many developers and template designers. And they have to agree to support the new version. Otherwise this new version won't be of great use for users, because of the missing extensions, which are IMO extremly important for CMSimple.
Consider CMSimple_XH's move to UTF-8, which was very farsighted for future development and use. Even if it is a moderate incompatibility, much work was needed to update different extensions. Unfortunately this wasn't done for all existing extensions. So some users still can't upgrade to newer XH versions, if they want to keep the incompatible extensions. For most extensions the switch to UTF-8 might take no more effort than converting the files to UTF-8. But for some extensions (e.g. Genizforum) it is not that easy. And to make it possible to further use those extensions CMSimple LE was born.
Now consider even more comprehensive changes to the core. Probably another fork of CMSimple will be made by somebody. So users have to chose between one of them, and developers have to provide different versions of their extensions, so that they can be used with all forks. And as I can see from the rather few contributions of other developers to this topic, they are either not interested in it or have already too much other work to do. And I suppose the latter is the case.
Christoph