The other day someone was talking to me about building a version of Joomla! that is effectively just a simple blog platform. I figured that this wouldn’t be too hard to achieve – just need to pull stuff out. So that’s what I did. This is somewhat similar to another journey I took though in this one I’m not adding anything new.

I started by looking at the installation SQL file and sample data. I nuked a whole bunch of stuff in both files and brought it into a single installation file removing the sample data file. I nuked a few other pointless SQL files that were sitting around in the installation directory.

From here I set apart removing extra components until I got down to what I felt was the absolute minimum. I’ve actually been a bit lenient and included a few extra components I wasn’t quite willing to part with. In the administrator area I’ve killed almost all of the components except for content, frontpage and media. The admin modules are gone as a lot of the front end modules. The search plugins are mostly removed except for content and the XMLRPC layer is dead. A few of the templates are dead and I’m asking a friend to make a simple one as a replacement for rhuk_milkyway. I’ve also cleaned out some images and I nuked a lot of legacy junk that isn’t required any more.

I’m calling it Pine Tree as a difference though since I don’t really take apart the framework it isn’t that much lighter than a normal Joomla! instance. A copy is available on my JoomlaCode project, check out at http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/pasamioprojects/frs/?action=FrsReleaseBrowse&frs_package_id=5353. It is slightly branded though not a lot. There is one minor bug fix but on the whole it is a copy of 1.5.20 with a whole heap of stuff removed. Oh and don’t bother with the sample data or migration, either option will likely fail (will probably remove these later). There is also no administrator so don’t bother clicking on that either. Pine Tree template design and quick logo done by Making Digital Design. Let me know what you think.