What I Would Like
10 posts,
5 voices
36 posts
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Hi, I’m new to the forums, and after having read a little bit of the stuff out there and the roadmap for frog, I’d like to throw in my two cents about what frog needs and see what you all think. Here goes: • mailing mechanism:
• Once registering is available, user profiles (allows user to update their own information/manage subscriptions/etc…) • event calendar (with multiple views and option for rsvp’s by users) – paypal integration for payed events perhaps? • Integrated suckerfish or dropdown menus in core • Integrated newsletter management in core • Either Integrated forum or plugin forum like the one on this site or for example one of my favorite cleanest designs emptees.com. That’s pretty much it, I can’t think of anything else the main body of people with websites would want or need. Excluding e-commerce plug ins of course , which I feel are a wast of time anyways and should be left alone for the good of all. : ) Keep in mind this is just a list of things that come up when I make a website and I can already tell that Frog is more than capable of addressing these things. I think its real strength lies in the elegant, easy to use, uncomplex administrator interface. So I’m not looking to make things more complicated, just more fleshed out. I am super exited to see where Frog goes. What do you think should be added… or not? |
651 posts
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I like all of them. But I can tell you right now, none of these will make it to core. They are all easily do-able as plugins, even the user profiles thingie. :-) For things like event calendars, I’d like to suggest to the plugin devs trying to make co-operating plugins. |
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36 posts
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Well I can understand most of those being plug-ins, but I wouldn’t see why not to add dropdown menus, newsletter, and mailing functionality, bundled with every release at the very least as plugins though. In my opinion these are all absolute requirements for most CMS websites. From what I’ve seen I think what the developer community for frog can make these better for frog than any other cms out there. I’ll be keeping an eye out : ) |
316 posts
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I have to disagree. For my purposes, at least, there is no requirement for newsletter or mailing functionality. I have a contact form that put in place, it’s a plugin. I also have a dropdown menu, which is simply a snippet with the appropriate CSS and PHP in a snippet. There’s no need for a plugin, for those, and having it in a plugin would leave me with less control. |
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36 posts
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@mtylerb I realize leaving it in a plugin might leave less control, but if one were to be built I hope it would allow for customization of the dropdown menu in settings or elsewhere, maybe have a linked css file to edit. I do think however that it would be much more enjoyable to have the feature bundled as a plugin, but thats just me. Back on the control thing however, I really am all for less control. Think of the products presented by Apple. They only present things once, and the right way. And even with the serious lack of control over editing code, they still have an extensive developer community. This is how I view Frog CMS Things that need to be done should only need to be done once, the right way. Newsletter signups should be one step and quick for example (in my opinion). I think what I’m trying to say is, how much freedom do you have with code before things become too complex or time consuming to be worth it. I don’t want to have to add the css for the dropdown, or any other sort of code. I can, but I don’t want to. It took me four years to become competent teaching myself and that was too long, and not worth it. Frog seems to me to provide an extremely enjoyable out of the box experience. I would like to see more, not a ton more, but some things added to that out of the box experience. |
109 posts
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@moser: If you are willing to pay i will create all those as plugins for you, quick and easy install. Frog CMS is flexible so you can virtually do anything you want with it. If you need these components to be in the core then its probably best to use a different CMS that have these already, the only thing is you won’t get the flexibility that Frog CMS gives. I might consider writing up a tutorial on how to make a event calender in Frog CMS.
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1493 posts
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An interesting discussion, and one worth having! My own take on the general question (which I take to be something like “How much should a ‘default’ Frog CMS package deliver?”) is that the Project Goals document is more important here than the roadmap. Of course, these principles shape some of the responses above! The “core” of the CMS, then, will remain pretty spare. But the goals of Frog being “well-documented” and “extensible” should cater for users — like moser — who have somewhat higher baseline demands for their CMS of choice. There is no reason why some of these things can’t move forward together! It could also be the case that (in the future!) there could be a “core” Frog CMS release, and (non-core!) also more “full” specialist packages (perhaps on the analogy of Drupal :: CivicSpace, or the “ensembles” that users can share for developed installs of Symphony). As for the features moser suggests — I like ‘em all … except for the bit about “in the core” (see above!). Of course, what one user wants in, another user will have no use for at all (and would want to take out!). Sigh! The joys, eh? Meanwhile, easylancer wrote:
That made it easier to spot! :) Looking forward to see what you have in store! |
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36 posts
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Well, let me revise what I meant in my above posts. I don’t really mean that everything should be included in the core, just as core plugins in package like David suggested. : ) @easylancer: I really wish I could pay you to build the plugs but part of the reason I am so interested in frog is that I have $0 to invest : ) sorry. Part of the reason I suggest such functionality as core plugins comes from my dealings with customers. In particular lawyers. I have worked with some law groups on building their websites and these were some of the things that they wanted, and seemed basic enough, but for some odd reason no CMS met all their requirements. Jo***a! had suckerfish menus but if I had to look at the admin interface one more time I was going to shoot myself. Drupal had all of the functionality and a decent admin but looked like crud and had NO drop down menus. And all the other open source CMS systems were the same, giving too much or lacking just enough. So that’s why I added my input, but I’m sure there are things that other people want on their websites that are just as necessary and I don’t know about. What do you think should be on the priority list of plugins to develop? |
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651 posts
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That’s it.. :-) |
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36 posts
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Well as far as the plugins i mentioned being part of the core I really do believe a calendar, dropdown menus, newsletter, forum, and mailer should all become part of the frog core at some point. These are all such common requirements (at least for my work) that I think they should be maintained by the dev team. At least at some point… |
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651 posts
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@moser Maybe you’re right. Strictly speaking though, I don’t see any reason for any plugin to be maintained by the Core dev team. My reasoning is that plugins should generally be created and maintained by the community. Anyways, all this is of minor concern just now. Lets try to get to a Frog 1.0 first. ;-) |