Hi, Reading through all the development focus discussion and Dries' blog, what I see would be doable to target is an incremental process to pave the way for CCK, preparing for a possible 4.8 without CCK, but with the basic offering it would bring us. Dries outlines some needs for CCK like install profiles, dependency system. My simplified route proposal would not require these for 4.8, but still would offer great flexibility in how we can use the built in views of Drupal. 1. NCI (node cloning interface), for cloning node into book, forum, page, story, blog types (and any other the user desires). I imagine a simple interface at administer / settings / content types, where one can add another simple node type, provide a name and description, and that is it. This should be enough for the built in simple types, and should be forwards compatible for CCK. If CCK will not make it, this simple NCI feature could still be in place. 2. Abstract the view part of forums, book, blog, so that any node type can be added to a forum, a book or a blog equaly easily. This should be done regardless of taking the intermediary NCI setup, or going right to CCK. The point of this mail mainly is that we should go the NCI step first, and see if CCK can make it for the release. If not, the real end user advantage is still going to be there, being the possible addition of new content types (and losing the hassle of choosing between page and story for newcomers). Being able to push other types of content to blog or forum is a long awaited feature, at least one special forum module was developed for this very reason. Book allows us to add any type, but it is quite hard to add non-book node types to forums, not as easy as assigning a path alias (it should be that easy). So what do I see is that people can work on the blog/forum/book view abstraction in preparation for NCI or CCK, and we can add NCI as an intermediary feature (or a final one CCK being a contrib module extending it for the time being). This would greatly reduce bloat, and I am sure NCI would take a lot less code (and support :) then what is required now to support story, page, book, forum and blog. It would also be the most painless route to take to abstract the built in views, but still would pave the way for CCK a great amount, providing a much lower footprint solution for those not needing CCK goodness. IMHO core node types need no CCK to function. Attachments and path aliases are great node addons, polls can be retargeted as such, book outlining, forum and blog association can be retargeted as such, so what is left are only simple basic node types, which can be created with NCI. I strongly beleive that instead of taking another revenge on core with the introduction of CCK, a quick and smooth 4.8 transition would be possible with NCI, which takes one of the most important steps to pave the way for CCK, but still does not need a major overhaul of how nodes are done (it is not a heart transplant as opposed to how Dries explained CCK in his blog). Goba