14 years 4 months ago
Hi Folks,
Thanks to Dan on this thread
http://www.joomlabamboo.com/forum/general-bamboo/15339-please-rethink-quickstart he has triggered a lot of activity regarding the way that we produce the quickstart packages for our templates.
The quickstart packages take a lot of energy to maintain with the release cycle for Joomla plus our own internal release cycle for our extensions. In fact getting the quickstarts updated can account for maybe two weeks of dev time for one of us each time a new Joomla version gets released and that time will increase as the templates in the catalogue grow. So ...
We are in the brainstorming phase of rolling out a new quickstart solution - something we are tentatively calling the JB Snapshot.
The snapshot will be different to the current quickstart packages and will not contain all of the setup information nor will it contain the feature information as is presently the case for the quickstart packages. The idea behind the snapshot is that it contains a select handful of extensions, some commonly used menu items and some useful dummy content. And that changing from one template to another will be as simple as installing a small patch via the Joomla installer.
We have some pretty crazy ideas about how we can mix these elements up and create a dynamic Joomla installer but for starters I wanted to canvas what was useful to our members and to see what the perfect JB Snapshot would look like.
What is the base platform for creating a website that you would like to start from?
For the time being the beta version of the core Joomla setup has the following extensions installed:
- JCE wysiwyg editor
- XMap sitemap
- Extended Menu Module
- Google Analytics plugin
- NinjaExplorer file explorer
- Updateman for updating Joomla
- Plus all updated JB extensions
Id like to stick to only adding useful extensions to the core package and let the user decide to add stuff like forums, blogging platforms, forms etc.
The menu items are geared around a service type website with:
- Home
- Services
- Service 1
- Service 2
- Service 3
- Service 4
- Service 5
- Blog
- About Us
- Contact Us
And the dummy content includes some pretty pictures plus some lipsum text.
So there are the basics and now we want to hear from you about your thoughts on what the perfect snapshot would look like and what extensions you think are must haves for every Joomla installation. What is a good set of generic but useful menu items and content section / category hierachy structure?
Thanks Anthony