Discussion: Addon deprecations in v11

Some addons are planned for deprecation / archiving. This is a public comment topic about them.

I am planning to pull out of the Composr codebase a few addons which can no longer be maintained (at least not without sponsorships) or have not enough justification for maintaining any longer (again, at least not without sponsorships).

The following is a list of addons I've qualified for removal from Composr v11, and why:

* composr_homesite_support_credits - With Composr switching to a Bazaar model instead of being governed / sponsored by a primary commercial entity, we no longer use support credits. This addon is to be replaced (renamed) with, "composr_homesite_tracker", which maintains the Mantis bug tracker but removes the support credits. Another addon, "composr_homesite_tracker_escrow", might be created to allow sponsoring of issues via escrowing points.

* performance_compile (actually might be left in v11 and removed in v12) - Does not account for contentious_overrides which is new in v11. Also, we have plans to overhaul how overrides function in v12 which includes pre-compiling automatically.

* webdav - SabreDav is no longer being maintained, so this addon will break over time. In fact, it no longer works on PHP 8. It will take too much development time for us to maintain it ourselves unless someone is willing to sponsor it or step forward to help maintain it. Should it receive no interest before v11 reaches release candidate, it will be removed in v11.

* bantr - I see this one as bloat. It requires very specific answers to earn the points and can get quite annoying especially on sites with low member counts. It also does very little to increase content / site activity as it's solely a Private Topic feature.

* confluence - This addon was based around Atlassian's self-hosted instances, which are no longer supported. Atlassian is requiring all customers to migrate to their Cloud-based software. This addon might be replaced in the future with a cloud version of the addon ("confluence_cloud") and/or a static HTML export ("confluence_static_export") once Atlassian supports these features... but this self-hosted based addon will be archived.

* sugarcrm - This was an addon for a client. The client no longer uses SugarCRM, therefore we will no longer be maintaining this unless someone would like to sponsor it or maintain it themselves.

* twitter_support - Ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter, renamed it to X, and locked down the API to paying customers only, it is much harder to integrate X into any third-party project without shelling out lots of money. Therefore, we might be archiving this addon, or if we find a way around the lockdowns, at the very least it will be replaced with "x_support".

* demonstratr - It is far too complicated to set up on a server, poses security risks, and is quite useless when members can set up demos themselves. Hardly anyone allows personal demos of their software anymore. It's not worth keeping and maintaining.
 

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Please comment if you oppose the removal of any of these addons (and why), if you believe something should be added to the list (and why), or if you wish to sponsor the maintenance of an addon on this list so it can remain in Composr.

Addons which get archived will be removed from the main Composr codebase prior to the first stable release of v11, maybe sooner. They will be placed in a separate repository specifically for archived addons.
 

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Specific issue: 0005687: Addons to archive / remove from the codebase (ongoing) - Composr CMS feature tracker

GitLab repository where archived addons will be stored: Composr ecosystem / Composr archived addons · GitLab