Where does Ninjoomla go from here?
Follow up:
As you all probably know by now, we run a Kaizen System at Ninjoomla, and every month we need to highlight something we are missing or not doing well, and suggest improvements to the site and/or our process.
For this month's Kaizen I made an executive descision about where we would head with our work.
Once we move to the new Ninja Forge site, we will be stopping development on 'new' extensions for a while and moving all our focus to combining and upgrading our existing extensions.
We will even be throwing out (i.e. no longer supporting, but leaving up for download) a few redundant extensions so we can focus on the places where we are needed.
After this clean out we will be left with 8 primary extensions and 20 - 30 secondary extensions. So we are planning to merge or drop almost half of our extensions.
The 8 primaries will be:
- Ninja Content
Super Submit meets My Content with a healthy dose of other features. - Ninja Tatami
Template management at it's finest - Ninja Edit
A new powerful wysiwyg editor, to bring all of our plugin commands together. - Ninja Plugin Controller
This Component/plugin combo will combine the majority of our current plugins into one larger, more flexible and more powerful plugin. Best used in combination with the Ninja Editor for easy tag writing. - Ninja Dashboard
Similar to Ninja Plugin Controller, Ninja Dashboard has two main features, firstly is an igoogle like dashboard for your users. Secondly are remote modules, each containing the ability to function as any of our current 'module in a module' extensions - ezeeaccordion, modulehider, modragulizer, iedegriefer, now you see me, ezee image, ezee logo, ezee dragger, ultimage, and so on. - Ninja Custom Gallery
This little beauty we will keep you in suspense for. But the release is coming soon. It will be Joomla 1.5's first dedicated gallery and contains lots of fun and useful features: custom information fields, gallery and category designation, shadowbox integration and more. - NinjACL
Yup you read that right. We will have our own ACL component for Joomla 1.0 soon. eh, only Joomla 1.0 I hear you ask? Well J1.6 is (apparently) going to have native ACL and there are already several good acl managers for Joomla 1.5 so it's an uphill battle with a visible finish line. We didn't feel Joomla 1.5 ACL was a good investment of our time (and our member's money). - Ninja Community
Another suprise! Part of the holdup on JSpaces was us trying to decide what to do. This one isn't confirmed yet, but we will either pick back up active JSpaces development or provide a powerful and intuitive Community Extension for you.
Aside from these, we will have the 20-30 secondary extensions. These will be things like Ninja Join Now, Ninja Clicky, Ninjamonials etc. Useful tools but ones with a clear 'feature set' that we can reach quickly and then consider the extension complete, with it needing only minor maintenance and occasional upgrades.
This reorganization will allow us to concentrate our efforts on a select few extensions to give you the best we can, instead of spreading ourselves thinly across as many extensions as we can build.
So that is what the future holds! Exciting times ahead for us all.
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7 comments
to really focus on a few extensions. Keep up the good job guys. My only concern is that, there are a lot of really great extensions out there already and I hate for you guys to recreate the wheel. For example Community Builder. I would like for you guys to enhance the original community builder, because a lot of plugins has already been developed for it.
I would rather you guys (girls) take a lot at what the !Joomla community is doing and try to do something new or enhance what is out there.
There will be some exciting news on the community front soon. But it's still hush hush for now.
I can say it looks like something might be coming in Joomla 1.6
I agree you should focus on few extensions and update existing ones.
Please consider to confirm Ninja Community! You should really enhance CB with these ready-to-use plugins:
- enhanced cb login module
- invite
- customize profile
- cb tab for forums like vbulletin/phpbb
Thanks! ;-)
Please upgrade Super Submit with some new options and maybe you can create new module for showing autor of the article.When person click on autor name ,new page is open with autor picture ,some description and all articles who autor was submit.
Regards tropoli
But if we tell you that NInja Something will have feature A, B and C. And later on figures out we can't add feature B.
Most people will get upset of the missing feature B and almost forget the nice A and C.
Moral is, it's much better to tell you what we can deliver, rather than what we want to deliver.
Telling you our plans for Ninja Community is not a very good idea since there are lots of undecided things around it.
However, I promise you that when things get stable, and are closing in on release, none of us will be able to keep our mouth shut ;)
Oh, and the reason for us being a bit quite lately is not because we are lazy, more the opposite.
As you see, we are changing focus. We do not want to give you just small extensions any longer. We want to give you all we got basically. And take your site to new highs.
The let down on this is longer time between each release.
But not necessarily.
Anyways, all I can tell is that our goal for Ninja Community is not to enhance CB. By doing that we would have to hack it to get it as good as we want it.
And why not make our own if we are to put so much effort in it?
Cheers,
_________________________________
Stian Didriksen
NinjaForge Developer
NinjaTheme Designer
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