Before going forward do some planing and be clear WHERE you/we are going. To do that put together a grop of:

-site owners/builders - people that create/need diferent tipe of sites/solutions (company site, personal site, blog, online shop, catalog-compare/matrix, forum ...);
-module developers - people, who create diferent type of modules;
-designers - people that develop themes;
-webmasters - people who manage web sites every day;
-some end users

and ask them what they need from XOOPS in their work, what they would like to see in xoops.
Be absolutely clear what the future XOOPS will be (one developer playground, the next Joomla /do we need another one?/, easy to set up and use system for end user personal sites, stable and secure business level system ... something else. AND IT CAN'T BE ALL OF THAT IN THE SAME TIME!).



Evaluate the current situation of the XOOPS code and the options. Code up to 2.0.13.2 is one style, 2.0.14, 15, 16 is messed with another style and 2.2.x is very diferent.
-Building on 2.0.16 foundation will make the code harder to read. And personaly I don't agree it is clean code in 2.0.16. Example - for theme designers one code for top blocks and another for bottom. Lot of old code is still left and buried deeper in files - xoops13_header ... Do someone using XOOPS 1.3 themes and do they work?
-Bringing 2.0 and 2.2 together will create heavy code too.



Agree on where XOOPS should go and what it should look like - architecture, features ...
Separate the management an development teams - developers should write the code, managers should help them stay on the agreed path and coordinate with other tasks - betatesting, themes, and so on ...
Make the team with people, that accept the path and only then start development


Sorry if my english is not very clear ...

Good post

Quote:

I like your thinking but wonder where xoops.org is going to find the last group as I suspect that most of us on here are, at the very least, webmasters.

Maybe those of us who are webmasters only should ask our own sites' users what they want? Might provide a bit of insight that isn't mainly techie-biased?

Quote:

We could get close......

Could we have a well-functioned, stable and secure admin core as the main download for business/developer/experienced user market, but offer a small range of other downloads containing a selection of mudules which install with the core and work straight out of the box for the new users?

Or am I suggesting something which is difficult to code?

Quote:

Your English is excellent........ volunteer for the documentation team, perhaps?

Actually, you're always very helpful and knowledgeable when replying to posts asking for help in the Forums. Come and join me in the "Community" team