Meeting the user's needs, but not more.

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sutharsan's picture

(or how to reduce a module's functionality)

During it's lifetime a contributed module's functionality expands, which often leads to a module packed with features. This growth of features is common for all software, but for Open Source the rate of expansion seems even higher. Feature rich software may be beneficial to the user but it comes at a price. Usability often suffers.

To prevent Simplenews (of which I am the maintainer) from being cluttered with features which are not used anymore, I decided to make a questionnaire to investigate the use of the module. The purpose is to know how users use the module (how many newsletters, how many subscribers, etc.) which features are used and which new features are desired (from issue queue feature requests). With the results I hope to be able to remove unused features or move the less common ones into a 'dusty coner' of advanced settings or into a separate extension module.

If you are a Simplenews user, please help by filling out the questionnaire.

Comments

great idea

greggles's picture

This is a great idea.

I've also toyed with the idea of creating a page in my modules that outputs all of the settings for the module. This is helpful in debugging issues because I can see their settings and it is also helpful for trying to see what things are commonly used or just left alone which could become hidden defaults instead of exposed options.

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