www.jobollen.be

In the smallcore debate we should focus on what our goal is. We don't want a smaller core as much as we want an independent core. To build a better teddy bear it doesn't matter so much that the openid module or blog module ship with core, but it does matter that the system or profile modules tie in with the node module, hard coded.

In his article Adrien says that "[a] large portion of time spent building something like Managing News or Open Atrium is spent undoing the assumptions that Drupal has baked into core directly." I agree with this. I don't agree that this means that we should never include a default wysiwyg in Drupal for instance. I think we should, but that it should be as a completely independent module that we can simply switch on and off. The main goal is to have a Drupal core which we don't have to alter in order to create our own distribution or highly customized site.

There will be a higher resistance against a smallcore because this means we're no longer working towards our goal of eliminating middlemen. It moves Drupal towards a framework instead of a user-friendly cms while it really can be both. If we see Drupal simply as a framework then why would we add cck or views in core instead of keeping them as a contributed modules? An independent core however would allow for the blog, openid, cck and views modules to be part of core as separate components. It means we can ship core with different installation profiles like a multiblog or a social network profile, while not getting in the way of more custom distributions like Open Atrium.