Customizing Web Apps: Beyond UI

What a great application! There are, of course, a few things that I would love to see in it though. Custom themes, slide transitions, animations and more!

Now, I'm no expert, but I've made use of javascript for quite some time now. And like any developer, I know how to modify code and change it do what I need it to do. Wouldn't it be great if we could do this in the way we modify desktop applications to create mods?

There's more to creating a euphoric web than just allowing custom themes... etc. One reason why any product will never be able to please the end-user to their very perfect needs is: our needs are always changing!! Making an application extensible and customizable is going to take more than building a plug-in framework with some theme templating system. It's going to take code, all of it realistically. Once more, getting to the point of complete modification of our online applications will mean that the community as a whole can come up with far greater additions to the web application than the original developers could ever think of.

I'm not saying open-source ports for web-applications, what I'm actually saying is that we can provide this kind of a system on our existing technologies. All it takes is a few new approaches in development.

1. Component Based Development
   if each component can function on it's own, adding components should be just as easy.
2. Create a well written MVC design.
   having a separated view allows for the modifications to become even easier to the community. For instance, adding animations to the presentations would be really easy if the model allowed it. All it takes is another view that can resolve to a presentation item of some kind.

In this kind of approach, I believe that we can create a whole new type of web environment for everyone involved.