Symphony.

that response makes a pretty good point - As a Designer with not much coding-knowledge I’m not really sure how much my needs are of relevance for a rather “developer-focused” CMS like Symphony - but the one thing where symphony really starts to feel “bloated” for me is managing extension-updates manually while keeping an eye on compatibility. So concerning this I’m absolutley with Nils:

if it’s the concept of the core to have a huge extensions folder then at least the concept of managing extensions needs to be revamped

I know that using Git might make things a lot easier, but I’m just not there yet - I just learned XSLT, if I’ll find the time Git might be next, but I definitely think that the updating-workflow for non-Git-Users needs a big improve if these kind of people are wanted to be kept as a target audience.

I really understand all your concerns about “not bloating the core”, but “bloating maintenace complexity” ain’t a good thing either. So in addition to an improved extension-management I’d love to see some of the very basic extensions added to the core - Especially the ones that Nick already suggested:

In fact I’m of the opinion that some of these should actually be in the core — re-ordering, number field, unique text and unique uploads.

Maybe a way to ease the burden of extension management is to work on bundling sets of features into one extension. For instance, we could take a data type, like a blog, and combine the extensions that change the admin area and add blog-specific features like trackbacks into one extension. Then you could treat the extension more like a module and only keep track of maintaining one extension.

I know ensembles are similar, but with those you can’t add them to an existing site.

I know ensembles are similar, but with those you can’t add them to an existing site.

Maybe that’s the problem!

Imagine. ;)