As discussed in the team forum there is a need for providing a new home screen for MP instead of the legacy classic home and basic home screens. This new home screen should be configurable in MP, so that there is no more need for skin-specific home menu editors. Consequently it should not only provide the home screen, but should be used throughout the whole MP menu hierarchy, which can then consist of more that only 2 levels (home and plugins).
The development is split up in two parts that can be implemented in parallel:
Part 1: Development of a generic menu control capable of supporting various single- and dual-level layouts (backward compatible with the legacy menu control for legacy skins and for legacy code using it). If we have a well defined layout interface, the community / the developers could even contribute their own favorite layouts...
Part 2: Development of a new generic menu plugin with builtin menu editing functions as a substitute for the legacy plugins (home, basic home and plugins). This plugin is using the menu control to display a menu level. It reads its menu structure information from the MediaPortal.xml file where it is stored by the menu editing functions.