Essential modules - what do I need to keep?

Regular Joined: Aug 05, 2006 Posts: 55 Location: Thailand

I'd like to build a Raven system for a customer that will be intentionally "leaned out" so as not to be too confusing / intimidating / overwhelming for technophobes... only give them what they want and need.

A lot of the modules like reviews, encyclopedia, journal, etc will never get used, so they could be deleted. My question is ... which modules are critical to the function of RN? I know that the forum is essential, as is nuke sentinel, but what others absolutely must remain in place for the system to run reliably?

Tks in advance.

Meoff

Posted: Mon Jun 22, 2009 10:55 am

Best way I can think of is to load a local install with XAMPP and just start removing stuff.

Posted: Mon Jun 22, 2009 5:49 pm

It's complicated. *nuke and hence RN is not really designed or programmed "modularly". I have been experimenting myself with a leaned out version including removing tables for modules that aren't needed. But you encounter things like header.php includes counter.php which in turn updates some of the statistics tables. So, if you do an xampp and start removing tables be sure to turn database logging on so you can see what errors you are generating behind the scenes.

There's many dependencies on forums baked in also. You can't even install (run setup.php) if you don't have a bbconfig table for instance. I wanted a system without forums and had to hack setup to accomplish that ... then I found out that I had to hack some of the RNYA programs because they depend on (or reference) the forums tables too.

Posted: Tue Jun 23, 2009 4:35 am

fkelly, thanks for saving me time Wink

,
I stripped a lot of unessential modules and I was considering removing the forums to implement the newest bb3.
The one I kept though , are submit news ,news , journal, PM's , forums,groups, YA , METAuthors,Topics,Stories_Archive well all the modules I thought had dependencies with RNYA and the one I used most.

Posted: Tue Jun 23, 2009 6:52 am

Eldorado, you are welcome. Of course if you are not compulsive and thus don't delete MYSQL tables before loading (I edited rn_core.sql) you won't generate so many errors. And it would be good to be able to easily do a distribution without Forums -- and the codependent Private Messages (which I hate and would love to have off my systems). Not sure off the top but there might well be dependencies between news and comments?

Longer run what we really need is a table of tables showing whether a table is used in "core" or what module(s) it is used in. And our code should check whether a module is installed before calling on any of its tables. We're a long way from that I'm afraid.

Posted: Tue Jun 23, 2009 3:54 pm

What I was thinking is (with a new admin.php) put the essential modules back in the admin pannel , that way we are not confusing ourselves about what to remove or not.
fkelly, indeed , PM module is deprecated and I'm looking forward for a replacement.Maybe a similar one to Vbulletin's.But thats on my todo list which grows too fast for my coding ability.

Posted: Sun Jul 05, 2009 2:17 am

ZZZZZzzzzzoooooooommmmmm...........

That's the sound of most of the replies here going right over my head!!!

I hadn't inntended to modify the SQL at all- just delete the non-seesntial modules from the modules folder so that they would no longer be visible / usable by the client.

I've leaned out my installation with some "trial and error" - thanks for all the replies!

Rgds,

Meoff