[software] Design Decisions

[Donald A. Lobo]

> 
> As far as making it extensible, at this point I'm more concerned with 
> making what I am doing as polished as possible. Again, this goes back to 
> my interest in actually making money off this thing. That means building a 
> piece of software that's easy to use, looks good, and satisfies the needs 
> of some chunk of the market.
> 
> I'm certainly not going to build it so as to rule out future expansions, 
> but pluggability and such are not high priorities. Future features will 
> probably be tightly integrated into the existing code, because this is the 
> only way to maintain that high level of ease of use and polish that I 
> think is crucial for a hosted service. Basically, this will be opinionated 
> software, which means it will probably never be all things to all people. 
> Instead, I hope it's the absolute best option for _some_ people 
> (preferable, people with enough money to pay for service ;)
> 

If there is one thing, we would do differently in CiviCRM in retrospect, I would make it even more pluggable and extensible than it currently is. Drupal is a great model for this and you might want to think about the pluggability/extensibility aspect a bit more

IMO, irrespective of how generic the service is, there are folks who want to tweak/extend/modify it in slightly different ways. On the other hand, if the sole goal is a hosted service and not an OSS distro, then its not as important

my 2 cents

lobo