Hi,<br><br>I&#39;d like to propose a new subproject on JIRA, called XWiki Flavors.<br><br>What is a Flavor? A flavor is a custom XWiki-based site, with one specific goal in mind. The XPN team creates such flavors when working for client project. As it is said on 
<a href="http://jira.xwiki.org/jira/browse/XWIKI-356">http://jira.xwiki.org/jira/browse/XWIKI-356</a> , by default XWiki comes with a collection of pages, panels, classes, a pre-selected skin, etc, which gives it a &quot;flavor&quot;. Right now, it looks like a nice site where you can put some pages (content), articles, documentation, etc. It is a weak flavor, since it&#39;s a mixture of different ingredients put all together.
<br><br>An example of a &quot;strong&quot; flavor is a blog-wiki. When you install XWiki and choose the blog-flavor, you will get the full functionality of any blog app (for example blogger or wordpress) without having to customize anything, without having to import one or several xar-s, editing the main page or anything. Of course, after the user gets used to the blog (and XWiki) he can customize the skin (using a friendly skin browser and a skin wizard), the displayed panels (using the panel wizard), and many other things (actually anything a user can change in XWiki, which is everything).
<br><br>Other strong flavors could be content management, OpenSource project website (about, developer guide, user guide, download, ...), or just the documentation for such a project (many projects use wikis now), Social Networking site (link and photo sharing, tagging, reviews), project management, and so many more.
<br><br>Why are flavors necessary? Because XWiki is too powerful. Put it in the hands of some who-knows-what &quot;haskel model checker&quot; developer who only knows about axioms, theorems, proving, model checking and functional programming, and he will run away very fast to a simple wiki engine, or worse, a CMS. But hide all the power behind a simple interface, with only what he needs in order to publish some info about his project, and we have a happy XWiki user.
<br><br>Why do we need a new subproject? Because:<br>- putting all the flavor-specific issues in the &quot;Default database&quot; component is not efficient<br>- neither is putting them in a new &quot;Flavors&quot; component
<br>- we don&#39;t know how many flavors we will create, so making an XWiki component for each flavor will bloat the component list<br>- flavors don&#39;t follow the XWiki platform release plan; they get shipped when they are ready
<br><br>What is the relation between flavors, default database, and xwiki-applications?<br>The default database should be almost empty. It should contain mainly the setup wizard, which can be used to install a flavor.<br>
A flavor contains some applications bundled together. It is not enough to put only the individual applications in JIRA, because a flavor is more than that: a custom skin, configuration for the applications, rights setup, other documents outside of applications, java plugins, XWiki configuration, and even more.
<br><br>What should the subproject contain? First, a &quot;global&quot; component, regarding flavor development, deployment, integration, installation. Then a component for each flavor we are currently supporting (or starting to work on).
<br><br>WDYT?<br><br><br>Sergiu<br>-- <br><a href="http://purl.org/net/sergiu" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">http://purl.org/net/sergiu</a>