Many of the changes being sought within GCN involve making things much more pluggable. This will make it easier for developers, certainly, but I think the greatest benefit will be seen by site admin.
For example, it's desireable to be able to simply drop a module dll into a directory, restart the app, and have the module be usable, database configuration and all.
For that matter, database configuration is being looked at for analogous changes. Changes to skinning are also being considered.
As far as safety, GCN's first release should be a snapshot of CSK, brought up-to-date with bug fixes. We wanted a solid base before we started re-architecting things. I would expect modules written for CSK would have to be rewritten once the new architectures are brought into play.
Keith J. Farmer
http://www.thuban.org
[email protected]