>I am working on a new project that is going a little out of my expertise (if I have any). Our company is going to produce a web application that we will re-sell to other companies. We will have a canned product (which is straightforward enough), but we will also allow customizations to be made to a customer that requests it. How would we go about this without recreating our logic/data structure?
>
>My first thought is to write the canned product which will have all of the core functionality. The customizations would be a separate application that would inherit from the core functionality. Is this the right way to do this? We want all core functionality to be available to everybody and all future core modifications to also be applied to the customizations.
>
>Help me Rhonda, help help me Rhonda. Are there any Rhondas on here?

This is something I face everyday in regards to what I do and also in regards to my framework. It requires a lot of thinking. One think that helps is to make everything generic. So, when comes time to respond to such request, sometimes, you would already have something in place for that. I also find that adding a field in a table, which would be a Text field, can serve for such purpose. I have developed a class in my framework that can store various information in such a field which allows me to respond to such request occasionnaly. It just depends on the needs. But, sometimes, it could do the job. Basically, this Text field works as the session property I have on this site. What is encrypted includes a bunch of fields with their values. So, the same goes with this Text field. So, I can add related information for such purposes and in some cases, it could be ok. Otherwise, if you would need relational data, then you would have to store it in a table. So, basically, you would build a structure that you can expand where you would be able to use an existing table to store the data from upcoming requests.

So, from an administration interface, you allow an administrator to use that table and specific additional field names that they need to add in their application. Then, wherever you need those, you would then rely on this generic table to retrieve them.

But, doing so would then require the code to be ready for it. So, there is a lot of work in the code design as well that would be required.

The best is to have the perfect application at first. :) But, this never happens. lol