There are no general “basics”. No universal default styling/behaviour that suits everyone’s needs. You suppose that everybody use the gallery the same way, but that’s not quite right. Just try to offer the concrete implementation (design, layout, markup) and you’ll find that half of users are not pleased with it at all. Try another one and the first half would be against it once again.
I use ~6 gallery solutions on my sites right now. They are totally differrent and incompatible with each other. They use different lightboxiing libs (or no libs at all) and have completely different layout. Which one should be implemented in the core? Yours, I guess? The seventh. And I’ll have to remove basic styling and poor default lightbox 20+ times in my sites just to keep everything as is.
It’s not the core. It’s theming.
Fall back to the default minimalistic gallery which is universal for any other plugin or theme.That is the key concept. Defaults are the most widely supported. That makes the whole system flexible.
P.S. And I agree with James that starting some petitions is the best way to estimate the real community needs and interests. Please transform your vision into a list of separate features and let us vote for each one separately. I’ve read through the whole discussion and it seems that all arguments are cycling around all the same things. Why not just vote instead?)
It must be lovely having the luxury of managing one website (or a few similar websites) and imagining the perfect CMS that would do exactly what you need it to do out of the box (if only the developers would listen!).
Most of us (and CP’s primary market) manage multiple websites with a wide variety of requirements. Keeping the core clean and simple (there are plans to further clean up and simplify) is what we need from a professional CMS, modifying or adding features with well-coded, well-supported plugins (possibly creating our own for a particular use).
CP is a community-led platform that encourages the efforts of third party developers to bring all kinds of great functionality to the table (in the form of plugins). And this also relates to the need to keep core clean and simple. I for one sincerely hope it stays that way.
My suggestion, again, is to start a petition for these things. My advice for the petitions is to keep them very clear and specific, one petition per topic. The media library petition is going to be interesting since it is not at all clear what should be implemented there at the moment.
We have already started differentiating ourselves from WP in small ways such as removing Hello Dolly, and we are happy to continue this.
However we do need to follow our already-established process as outlined in our democracy guidelines and our roadmap. There are literally thousands of potential changes we could make, and the way we will prioritize them is by looking at what the community wants to see. This is a much better way of doing things than relying on your or my or the committee’s individual opinions.
In short: yes, let’s make ClassicPress what we want it to be, but in order for this to be possible you have to work with us. In this case, the first step is making small, focused petitions for what you want to see.
