Move Contact Layout Editor to a core extension
At some point, it would be good to get rid of the hard-coded contact summary screen, and just let the Contact Layout Editor manage the display.
As an intermediary step, it probably makes sense to move Contact Layout Editor into the core tarball (via distmaker import), or the ext/
directory of the core repo.
Today might not be the day for that, but logging some notes on it anyway:
- Today, the only benefit of moving the extension into core is it would be more visible to end-users.
However, in the future, benefits might include:
- Easier simultaneous development of extension & core with no version conflicts.
- Possible to enable the extension by default.
- Possible to rip out redundant functionality from core.
Challenges
- There isn't an easy upgrade path when an extension is moved into core; you end up with 2 copies of the extension
- Currently, the extension scanner does not give the core
ext/
directory top priority, which means older versions of the extension outside core would take precedence.
Considerations
- As handy as it is, Contact Layout Editor still uses smarty to render the page.
- Maybe the end-game is to make that page an Afform instead. However, that day is a long way off given Afform's current capabilities.