[xwiki-devs] [Ideas] Some thoughts about Extension Manager's future

Hi, I want to list some ideas about Extension Manager that come to my mind. I'm sure others thought about them already or will find the time to make some other suggestions: 1) Filtering core extensions Would be nice to be able to view preinstalled applications with EM. Right now everything that comes preinstalled is found inside 'Core extensions'. There are a lot of technical extensions, but there are also some extensions that could be of general knowledge. For example it would be nice to see what functionality a default wiki has in terms of applications and macros (even nicer if we think about future flavored packages). This would allow the administrator to quickly scan and customize the tools at his disposal. Maybe it would be interesting to have some filtering functionality. This way I could filter for applications and see that I have preinstalled 'Activity Stream', 'Annotations', 'Search', 'WYSIWYG', 'Message Stream', etc. and if I filter for macros I could get 'Chart macro', 'Box macro', 'Display macro', 'Message macro', etc. 2) Enable/Disable applications from inside EM Another idea is for the EM to sustain enable/disable actions for installed/core applications/macros. Right now applications like 'Annotations', 'Search Suggest', 'Message Stream', even 'OpenOffice Server' have special settings that permit to enable ('activate') them. This functionality could be covered by the EM and not display anymore special administration sections for each applications. 3) Integrate application configuration inside EM If EM will manage installed applications and would also allow the enabling/disabling part, than is normal that the application configuration should be made also from inside the EM and not as a separate Administration component. Although all things in XWiki are extensions and components, we would need to get along what the lightest version of xwiki would contain (in terms of functionality and not components). For this default functionalities (Users, Rights, Localization, Presentation, Import/Export, etc.) the Administration sections would be still used, since they could be considered core elements and not something that can be disabled or uninstalled. Maybe all the thoughts I am writing here could also be solved if we rewrite some functionality like 'Activity Stream', 'Annotations', some macros, etc. and not display them anymore as 'Core Extensions' but rather as 'Installed Extensions'. Thanks, Caty