[Tomjosetj31]

The instinct to keep the system "small in concept" is the right one, and it's harder to maintain than it sounds — most CMS projects start focused and then bloat themselves into irrelevance trying to be everything. The tell will be how you handle feature requests that are genuinely useful but push against that philosophy. What's already been the hardest "no" to say?

[nsayoda]

Very well put. I'm hoping most features can live in standalone plugins built by the community or myself, rather than being built into the core. The goal is to keep the core small and avoid bloat, while still leaving plenty of room for features and customization.

The hardest "no" so far has been a request to change the license from AGPLv3 to MIT

That might not sound like a huge deal, but most of my previous FOSS projects have been MIT licensed, and with this one I want to keep the expectation that modifications to the core remain available to the public under the same license terms

I did carve out explicit exceptions around a boundary: third-party themes and plugins are not intended to be pulled into the copyleft scope. I spelled that out in the repo alongside the license in the LICENSE.*.EXCEPTION files