Lets add "enabled/disabled" features per project.

[belonesox]

At the moment, each project detects available capabilities on startup (cocalc/src/packages/project/configuration.ts).
But on the same server (or on the same docker image) there can be

• projects for "experienced users" (using all the capabilities of cocalc)
• Projects for students — there UI must be clear and simple, not like Bugzilla/EnterpriseApp ( illustration ).

Very hard choice!

I see the last UI with square buttons looks a bit more estetic, but actually anyway we lost a lot of space for something weird and rarely used.

• 1 sq feet for
  — if «access blocked» —«why are your here?» And I failed to find correspongin project settings.

• «Timers» and «Todo list» — hmm.... they used really rarely.

• «Graphical desktop» — I still failed to make installation with acceptable latency, may be someday Antoine improves Xpra, and it can be usable.

• Now we need to scroll for «Upload» drag-and-drop pad.

Let stop arguing what artefact is important, just make it tunable, for example,
for some student «Jupyter Notebook» + «Folder» will be sufficient, for old R-lovers «Folder + RMarkdown» will be OK, etc.

So, lets «enable disable» available features on project settings page — for example, just add additional checkbox per row on «avalable features» block, that enabled (or disabled) feature per project + fea. Of course, somehow store it on DB (JSON?), etc…

[williamstein]

In course configuration you can disable/enable a large number of things across all the projects in a course:

This could (does?) change what buttons appear in +New. This could be expanded to impact more of what is available there.