Originally Posted by groove
I'll start with a couple of my ideas. One of Mazzle's greatest strengths was the Mazzifier, and the large number of addons that Mazz included and supported. However, this also turned out to be a big weakness, as many of those addons are now long out of date, and most would go unused in any case. My feeling is that the new Mazzle, whatever it turns out to be, should be as lean as possible.
The mazzifier process had a lot of great features. You could quickly and easily choose to add castbars, bank and auction house mods, threat and damage meters, and so on. But almost all of that functionality related to addons that most endusers could pretty simply and easily download and install themselves. I think the new Mazzle should focus, at least initially, just on recreating the mazzle interface in its most basic form: selectable skins, setting up the 3d models, arranging the various UI elements such as health/power bars, icons such as PVP/rest indicators, text and other related things. The new version of DUF should help with this immensely assuming it's working at least fairly well. Perhaps an actionbar mod could be added as well, although really, those are easy enough to download and set up separately. Basically, the devs would be developing a "Mazzle Lite" version of Mazzle.
A lite version would be much easier to maintain over the long term, and end users would still have the flexibility to add and configure the addons they like, without Mazzle being cluttered by scores of addons they'd never use.
When deciding what should go or should not go into Mazzle, I guess I feel it comes down to this: Is the feature or addon you want to add essential to the look and functionality of Mazzle? If yes, then of course it should be added to Mazzle. But if it's the kind of thing and end user could download and configure without a great deal of trouble, it should be left out imo. Threat meters, raid frame mods, inventory mods, PVP mods, cast bar mods, and the like are great and all, but I would rather that Mazzle not be cluttered with that stuff, when what I think we're all really after is a basic UI framework to which we can add our favorite mods.
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As a MazzleUI user, I concur at least partially, with what you're saying. The "first thing" should be ensuring that the UI portion of Mazzle is stable and looks "the same".
However, one of the problems I have found is the old "I didn't know I could do that!". If the latest MazzleUI, for example, had not had Omen -- I would never have known it existed and really would never have looked for it. However, I can not tell you how useful that add-on has been for me (as a 'lock). There are (were?) probably things that I had in Mazzle that I never even knew I had...and will miss in whatever I end up taking.
Maybe a compromise is in order; obviously, getting Mazzle working like it should is first priority. Perhaps, though, once that is worked out there could be an "Mazzle installation" type of thing that could be written that would allow you to include/exclude whatever "packages" you like...and the Mazzifier could know what packages are loaded and present display options for you? I'm not sure, of course, if any of this is possible (it appears to be possible in LUA...not so sure about Warcraft's flavour of it)...but it would be a "nice to have"...
Just my .02 (.001 with inflation and the market crash)...