Duplicated Modules Hall of Shame
This is a group to encourage more collaboration and peer review in contrib.
The first step is identifying and flagging modules which are extremely similar to each other, then looking for ways to consolidate efforts in that area. This means co-maintainership, upgrade paths, and making shared APIs to avoid duplicated code and effort.
Some times there are good reasons to fork a module, or similar looking projects can be very different when you actually use them, sometimes modules get released simply because people couldn't find what they wanted, or because they didn't realise they could file a patch instead.
This group won't be dealing with module metrics and rankings - because that group already exists: http://groups.drupal.org/module-metrics-and-ranking it's about dealing with the 2000+ projects we have already, and hopefully leading to new and fruitful relationships between contrib developers (despite the title).
Open Letter
I thought I'd form a sort of target page to direct the assorted maintainers that have been listed in the Dupes. Just to ping into all their respective queues in a polite manner.
As opposed to Various attempts to compare enumerate, tabulate and choose between available modules and features, I think we should be encouraging these developers to merge efforts or voluntarily retire their modules in favor of more consistant solutions.
Advanced Cron Modules
http://drupal.org/project/cronplus
http://drupal.org/project/cronapi
http://drupal.org/project/elysia_cron
I'll try to come back and actually compare them some time...
ACL Permission UI && DO project similarity block?
http://drupal.org/project/content_access
http://drupal.org/project/nodeaccess
I think there are some more access / permission UI modules but those two look for me nearly absolutely identical except content_access uses ACL for user permissions.
BTW: I see sometimes a block "Recommendation: Related projects" when accessing projects.. who is maintaining those information? Is it automatically tag based? Because in both cases each other isn't showing up.
Comparison of Node Limiter type modules
There are a lot of modules which aim to limit the number of nodes that a user/role can create. Here's a brief roundup (please add more types or qualifications via comments).
create quota
- Relies on rules
- 6.x only
- Claims to be extensible
- Seems to require the implementer to write some code
Node limitnumber
- 5.x only
- Limits per content type per role
user_quota
Default Input Filter
http://drupal.org/project/default_filter
http://drupal.org/project/filter_default
I love the difference in names.
Comment Notifications
Following on from http://buytaert.net/comment-notifications-via-email
Here's a quick review table. Please provide advise on how to improve it. I only listed characteristics for which they are different - e.g. all have MySQL support so why bother listing it?
Also, comment_subscribe is a fork of the comment_notify module and misses many great bug fixes and enhancements to comment_notify over the past few months. It also isn't currently maintained. I've got another 9 days on this issue when I will take over the project and merge it back into comment_notify. Thanks to the kind donation of a customer of mine (soon to be named...) I've added the one feature that comment_subscribe provided as an option in Comment Notify so there really is no reason for comment_subscribe at this point.
Panels & Composite layout
Hot of the new projects RSS feed today comes 'Composite layout'[1].
They do at least make an attempt to explain the similarities and differences with Panels[2], but let's look at those differences.
Jabber/XMPP
http://drupal.org/project/xmpp_server
http://drupal.org/project/jabber
http://drupal.org/project/xmpp
http://drupal.org/project/xmppclient
Digg-like voting modules
I haven't actually used these modules so I'm prepared to be wrong here, but these three modules seem to be awfully similar -- all with the stated goal of creating digg/reddit-like clones in Drupal:
http://drupal.org/project/drigg
http://drupal.org/project/drupalit
http://drupal.org/project/vote_up_down
Friends
http://drupal.org/project/friend
http://drupal.org/project/friendlist
http://drupal.org/project/ajaxfriends
http://drupal.org/project/user_relationships
In some good news, buddylist has been deprecated in favour of buddylist2, and buddylist2 looks like it might get deprecated in favour of friendlist - there's a migration path already.
http://drupal.org/project/buddylist
http://drupal.org/project/buddylist2 (?)
Coming up on the outside though, is http://drupal.org/project/flag - which now allows you to assign flags to users as well as nodes.
CSS Sprites vs Sprites
http://drupal.org/project/sprites
http://drupal.org/project/css_sprites
CSS Sprites doesn't even seem to have any code activity.....
Activity
Not all of these are duplicates, but this whole area is a bit of a mess at the moment and could use some co-ordination - especially when combined with buddylist/buddylist2/user_relationships/friend etc.
http://drupal.org/project/activity
http://drupal.org/project/user_activity
http://drupal.org/project/activity_log
http://drupal.org/project/FriendFeed
http://drupal.org/project/lifestream
http://drupal.org/project/activitystream
OpenSearch
http://drupal.org/project/opensearch
http://drupal.org/project/opensearchclient
http://drupal.org/project/opensearchplugin
http://drupal.org/project/opensearch_aggregator
Web Services vs Services
Web Services and the Services modules are the same aside from one difference: A custom implementation of OAuth....
Content recommendation modules
I think it'd be useful to have an overview of the various content recommendation modules in this group, and eventually a comparison review in the Handbook. I haven't used any of these apart from similar by terms, and may well have missed some, but we can expand as we go along. Additionally I've not used included anything like statistics, voting_api, views_bookmarks etc. which could probably be factored into a custom recommendation/ranking solution but aren't drop-in.
update 4th October 2008, another one:
