Nekkid Ninjas

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.