This article is written by erpe

As a reminder to William Shakespeare: core or not core?  This question comes up again in the german part of the forum. It is not the first time this is discussed but it is neccessary to get a final and lasting answer. Why is this answer important for the future of WebsiteBaker CMS? A short summary of the situation:

What is core?

For nearly all WebsiteBaker users core means the package that can be downloaded from the homepage of WebsiteBaker CMS.

But if you refer to the origin of this word core means all parts of code that is neccessary to get the cms itself run. In case of WebsiteBaker it means all directories excluding the modules and templates folder. But this is not right at all. Even some modules and templates are needed to get the cms run. Additionally you need

- one template for the frontend,

- one backend-theme for the backend

from the templates folder and

- jsadmin

- captcha_control

- wysiwyg

- droplets

- output_filter

- fckeditor

from the modules folder (hope I am correct).

This means...

At this time the whole delivered package is developed within the official svn.

This means in the past, that if you for example got an error  in  the form module it was reported on the project server and the official developers had a look for that error. If you for example had an error in the anynews snippet you report on the forum and anyone who is able to modify the code can post a solution there and is allowed to update and modify the snippet (or module).

It is at the end a question of responsibility if a module or template is recognized as part of the core for there are lots of modules that were not developed any further (please read this article too).

The problem

Now it seems that official WebsiteBaker would not support any module or template that is not part of the core so it is absolutely neccessary to define what is part of the core and what not. The first definition was that all parts are defined as core that could not be installed or de-installed via WebsiteBaker backend. But as you can see above this cannot be the right definition in the current situation. On the other hand updating modules and templates (even "extended core" modules and templates) is one of the big advantages of WebsiteBaker refering to other cms and to their own core-update-frequency  (see this article too). It was a real pleasure that you could update the droplet module from 1.02 to 1.03 for there was a bug in 1.02 that did not allow you to use more than one droplet on one page. The download-package from the homepage still contains 1.02.

The future

I don' think that problems can be solved with reducing the package to define the "core". From my point of view the current situation is fine. All modules that are really needed to get WebsiteBaker run and have first good experiences with this cms are currently part of the download package. This situation grants even modifyings and current development on basic modules. This should be retained unchanged.

But what is needed is more develpment power to keep the core and this basic modules maintained for the discussion had never started, if there were enough developers.

So there are two things left to do:

1. experienced module- and core developers should volunteer to help maintaining the code

and

2. a forum moderator should create a new topic in the english part of the forum to get more non-german-speaking-users involved in this discussion.

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