It's time to unbundle Minimal.

The original intent of the Minimal skin was to provide a launching platform for skin development by hobbyists. It contained (and still contains) only a scattering of settings and features, mostly just to illustrate how it's done.

Those days are long gone, and it's time to stop pretending. Given the expectations for web sites today, developing a useful skin from a very basic HTML framework just isn't realistic. And in fact, to my knowledge no one has done so within living memory.

As if that weren't enough, the skin was never really intended to be used to create working albums, and I don't think any user should be doing that. Despite various (misguided) attempts to modernize the skin, it's still an anachronism. At this point, it doesn't even know what it's supposed to be. The slide pages look like something produced by a lightbox script, but they're not. They have no image-to-image transitions (not even the "pretend" ones that I use in my own slide page skins), and since it's not actually using a lightbox script, it can't do things like slideshows.

Bundling this skin encourages users to use it. They should be actively discouraged from doing so. A user who wants a simple, uncluttered layout should be steered towards Plain or Atom. And like Minimal, Atom is a true slide page skin, with a simple, unfussy layout. And unlike Minimal, it has a thought-out collection of settings for customizing, rather than a haphazard collection of things.

Unbundling Minimal is the least that should be done. If it were up to me, it would be shuffled off to the legacy bin. This is not a skin that showcases all the wonderful things that jAlbum can do.

There are plenty of skins out there that aren't JSON-driven (like all of mine), including a few of the bundled skins - Animatics, Lucid, Split. Not a good enough reason to keep it around, IMO.


Yes, there are people using Minimal to make albums. But they shouldn't be. There are people using Chameleon, but that's not a reason to keep bundling it.

(The whole question of stats on skin usage is problematic, anyway, since there are vast numbers of albums you never see, hosted elsewhere. That's why the "most used" category on the skins page is meaningless.)

It just seems to me that jAlbum now has a good selection of bundled skins without including Minimal, including Plain, which is geared towards producing a clean, simple layout.

Maybe bundle Zigzag, instead? That one does something truly different. It could use some development work, but....

Yes, much better choice.

I come at it from a different direction. In response to a user question, "I'm looking for a skin that will do X, Y, and Z," when would my answer ever be, "You should use Minimal." Never.