Replace Drupal Planet and Drupal Talk with Drigg

We encourage users to post events happening in the community to the community events group on https://www.drupal.org.
wmostrey's picture

With all the new sites added to the planet lately it seems like a silly process to be done manually. Also the border between Drupal Planet and Drupal Talk is getting pretty vague, especially with all the resposts of late. The Smashing Magazine post about the Drupal Toolbox appeared 4 times on the same frontpage for example.

My suggestion: replace both Drupal Planet and Drupal Talk with Drigg. For those who don't know what Drigg is, it's like Digg but completely written in Drupal. Here are a couple of popular sites running Drigg:

I think this makes a lot more sense than having a couple of people manually add rss feeds to the Planet, especially since there don't seem to be any guidelines as to who gets accepted, and even people with no prior Drupal posts get added. I think using Drigg will allow the community to bring interesting stories to top and let the Planet regain its value as a resource for high-quality Drupal news.

Comments

I would think that someone

moshe weitzman's picture

I would think that someone could start this outside of drupal.org and if the concept proves useful, we can include it on d.o. thats the pattern we are looking at with drupalmodules.com, for example.

Aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!

mercmobily's picture

Hi,

This is my first reaction to this :-D
First of all, I need to make it absolutely clear that I am actually quite humble about my modules and my skills. People dealing with me in the "FriendList" mess might have gotten the wrong impression. Scrap that. That's me reacting at unresponsive programmers, badly maintained modules, unkept development promises, and so on.

Second: I am actually honoured that even such a proposal is made. Drigg's code is not as perfect as Friendlist's (that's my next task...), but it does work really well. I think the RSS importer feature would also work very well withing this scope.

Having said that: I am a terrible web designer. So, please DO count on me in terms of configuring the bloody thing, and telling you how to achieve what you want to do. But please don't ask me to design anything :-D

One issue: I really think we should use Drupal 6 for it. Drigg is very nearly ported to D6. I am saying this because when the D6 port is done, I will effectively stop supporting the D5 branch, to concentrate on implementing the last missing features on D6 (there are very few left, and they are getting on my nerves).

I agree with Moshe, the side should be done first, and then we should see how well it works in that context, and then propose the swap when it's "good".

Well, I hope this post made sense and was useful. I am now part of this group, so I will get emails :-D

Bye!

Merc.

drigg.org

wmostrey's picture

I'm actually not sure if the redesign entails upgrading drupal.org to Drupal 6, especially with the talk of integration the project pages with organic groups and adding panels, and panels only being in the first alpha release. However it be, if the Drupal 6 port doesn't add/change functionality I think we can already start with this experiment using the current Drupal 5 version.

I think it would be great if we could use drigg.org for this, because of the great name and the configuration already done. Since it's been inactive on the Ubuntu topic for quite a while, I think it's fairly easy to migrate it to focus on Drupal topics. That is if you are willing to use the domain name for it of course. I'm very willing to set up a my own test site for this but I don't think drigg.mostrey.be will have quite the same attraction in getting the community ramped up.

I am fine with it

mercmobily's picture

Hi,

The trouble with Drigg.org is that it really is a "test site". It's running on the latestest code of Drigg (even before it gets to the snapshot) and it's how I tell if something really breaks things or not.

I am totally happy to change drigg.org into drigg-test.org (or something like that) and basically give drigg.org to this project. Drigg.org also has tons of pagerank that is currently wasted.

But... do you really like the name? I have to ask you, because... I don't know, it sounds silly to me :-D

Let me know which way you want to go, and I will do the changing etc.!

I love it

wmostrey's picture

I think it's a great name, it says it all: it's a Digg written in Drupal and now also about Drupal. I don't think there's a lot you need to change to get it running, perhaps delete all current content and change the reference to "Ubuntu" into "Drupal" in the title? If you get it running, I'll be sure to create a couple of articles to get started.

I'm not sure if you should get a new domain name for the test site, I think test.drigg-code.org would do just fine, with drigg.org a live showcase site.

RSS importer feature?

aaron's picture

Is there some reason why you wouldn't instead use FeedAPI for importing from RSS feeds? That encourages more collaboration between maintainers, makes upgrading some of these beastly modules slightly easier, allows sites to avoid code replication, allows maintainers to concentrate on a module's specialty rather than trying to do it all, etc.

Aaron Winborn
Drupal Multimedia (book, in October!)
AaronWinborn.com (blog)
Advomatic (work)

Aaron Winborn
Drupal Multimedia (my book, available now!)
AaronWinborn.com
Advomatic

The easiest route

mercmobily's picture

Hi,

When I developed the importer, I followed the "easiest possible route" path. In that case, this is what I did: you actually set up the Aggregator. I simply leach off that. I simply add something extra to the RSS aggregator form (drigg-specific settings for the feed, including the flag that marks it as something Drigg should do something about). Then, a function called in Cron() finds out if there are new items -- if they are there, then it simply creates a Drigg node for each one of them.
There is absolutely no code replication there. I am simply leaching off a core module, which seemed like a very good idea!

Merc.

Unless this were also

aaron's picture

Unless this were also importing or aggregating content, I would not be comfortable with a complete replacement of Drupal Planet w/ Drigg. Although it's nice to be able to rate content and allow good content to bubble up, there's also something to be said for automatic Drupal feeds. However, if you were also combining it with FeedAPI, and importing the content, instead of relying on users to manually add each article, that might add more to what's already at d.p.

Aaron Winborn
Drupal Multimedia (book, in October!)
AaronWinborn.com (blog)
Advomatic (work)

Aaron Winborn
Drupal Multimedia (my book, available now!)
AaronWinborn.com
Advomatic

I don't want ranked content...

EclipseGc's picture

Don't get me wrong, I kinda like the idea, but I think it might be the wrong move... I find that Digg's "top content" is often very similar from time to time that I visit, and while this could be useful, it's not what I'd subscribe to... additionally, I'm not sure I see how subscribing to the newest articles feed helps me either (as it's really no different from the current feed) and on top of that, now everyone has to manually submit their articles instead of just blogging and being done with it? I'm not liking that idea at all.

If we want ranked content we could use FeedAPI + 5star couldn't we? Just an opinion...

Absolutely

mercmobily's picture

Hi,

This is absolutely something to consider.
We need to remember that the very nature of Drigg is this: "Lots of contents in the queue, through RSS or manually. There is a contest with the stuff in the queue. Whatever gets enough votes, gets voted up".

Sites that don't follow this format are better off not being Drigg sites, seriously.

Merc.

news.drupal.org

aaron's picture

That being said, this model is similar to some brainstorming sessions we've had with the drupal newsletter for news.drupal.org. Maybe those efforts could be combined with that:

http://groups.drupal.org/node/9451
http://aaronwinborn.com/blogs/aaron/proof-concept-stand-alone-drupal-new...
http://drupal-newsletter.org/issue/2008/01
http://groups.drupal.org/node/9432
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgdc84wd_11gtxkvnkd

Aaron Winborn
Drupal Multimedia (book, in October!)
AaronWinborn.com (blog)
Advomatic (work)

Aaron Winborn
Drupal Multimedia (my book, available now!)
AaronWinborn.com
Advomatic

I don't see the point quite yet

kyle_mathews's picture

At the moment there's really not that much traffic coming through Drupal Planet. Only 5-10 posts a day on average.

Digg like sites are useful when you're covering a domain with 100+ posts a day. Voting is a filter. There's no way an individual (unless you're Robert Scoble) can go through 100s of news articles a day but applying the wisdom of the crowds to the task, they'll bubble up the best content.

So I'd say until the community expands another 2-3 times there isn't much use for a Drigg on d.o. Perhaps in another year or so?

Kyle Mathews

Kyle Mathews

This was my concern

gdemet's picture

I'm not sure there's enough people yet who would be voting to make a digg-like site effective or useful.

Not enough posts

litrik@drupal.org's picture

I compared Planet Drupal with a couple of other planets. (See here.)
Planet Drupal does not have that much posts and they are relatively on-topic. I see no reason to make any changes.

Drigg wouldn't really change anything

Etanol's picture

Since Planet Drupal get's ~12,5 posts a day what would be the point of using Drigg? Don't get me wrong - Drigg is great and I use it with aggregated content, but I fail to see the need for content ranking if daily there is less than 5-10 times the number of posts you show on front page. Unless you expect much more content to be added I think that just adding a block with 10-20 most commented entries published within last month would be just enough.

Growing the Planet

wmostrey's picture

Remember that it's also Drupal Talk that we're replacing. I'm thinking more about creating a Drigg from each aggregated post, also from Flickr and Google News on Drupal for instance. This is also a great way to avoid duplicate content. Take for instance all the resposts about the Drupal Toolkit. Instead of having 5 reposts about that article on the Planet's frontpage, we'd have that article on top of the Drigg with a lot of votes. It's all about increasing quality and raising the value.

Update: This is exactly what I'm talking about: http://www.nowpublic.com/tags/drupal/scan. If we could add the aggregated feeds to this then that would be awesome. People can "recommend" specific posts, you have a good view of what people are blogging and tweeting about, see where they link to the most, ... If that link could include aggregated content from the current Planet than it would be my favorite bookmark.

Picking this idea up again

wmostrey's picture

Hi Merc,

It might be a good idea to enable the Drigg RSS module. Create only two categories: Drupal Planet and Drupal Twitter, and put the corresponding feeds in those categories. I think we should definitely give it a try.

very kind of you ;)

graphicsguru's picture

wmostrey, merc,
very kind of you to include my site
contact me any time if I can help on any part of the design end ;)
best regards

Wim mentioned this to me on

timmillwood's picture

Wim mentioned this to me on http://groups.drupal.org/node/15737 and would be happy redeploy my site http://blog.to.it as a Drupal Planet site.

Let me know what you think

Set up a prototype

wmostrey's picture

I set up a prototype for this: Drupal Digest.

More information on the project can be found here: Pimping the Drupal Planet.

nice Wim, looking good. We

timmillwood's picture

nice Wim, looking good.

We will have to put together a full spec / proposal as part of the Drupal redesign.

There are some great things that can be done using views, feedapi and voting api, I have just changed the "Top content" view on Blog to it to only show items that have been voted on in the last 96 hours so that it doesn't show out of date items.

Let's connect the dots and collaborate

gusaus's picture

Variations on this very good idea have been floating around for quite some time. And Moshe provides some of the best advice on why this sort of innovation should happen elsewhere before it makes it to the d.o. or g.d.o. motherships.

One thing I've always had trouble with is keeping track of all the news, trends, events, in Drupal as well as all the great learning materials (vids, podcasts, howtos, case studies, etc.). When we were trying to hash out a vision for the Drupal Dojo, I thought it made sense to have the new website be a place where users could filter and recommend both.

With the Dojo focusing on the content, the redesign (now given a generic 'install profile' type name) will be an opportunity to produce Dojo content (collaborative workshops, sprints, lessons) and an opportunity for some GHOP/DROP style project-based learning. The finished product/profile, features/components, modules, themes, will be freely available for the Dojo, g.d.o., or d.o. and anyone else in the world.

Starting with a planning session we're going to commence building this week. Would be great if it provides an opportunity to combine forces and innovate.

Gus Austin
PepperAlley Productions

Gus Austin

Hi Gus, I'm definitely

wmostrey's picture

Hi Gus,

I'm definitely interested in joining this discussion, and am willing to offer Drupal Digest as a live testing platform. Going through the different links you mention I wasn't able to find when the session is happening? I do wonder if the installation profile you're going for isn't focusing too much on being an educational platform. Will it be generic enough to be able to replace the Drupal Planet for instance?

Patterns

gusaus's picture

We're hoping our site build will provide a chance to kick the tires on a great module called patterns. Ideally all the variations of filtering/aggregation could be easily set up w/ just a few clicks. The content is really dependent of the specific needs of the site.

I'm thinking each major component of our site build could be it's own series of Dojo workshops and sprints. Drigg, FeedAPI, etc. could be explored.

Looks like our planning session will be @ 10am or 3pm PST on Thursday. Any preference?

Gus Austin
PepperAlley Productions

Gus Austin

10 AM or 3 PM on which day?

wmostrey's picture

10 AM or 3 PM on which day? :)

Also, it looks like patterns is only available for Drupal 5. Is anyone working on a Drupal 6 port?

Thursday

gusaus's picture

10am or 3pm PST this Thursday; There is an effort to upgrade Patterns to D6. Join the working group for more - http://groups.drupal.org/patterns

Gus Austin
PepperAlley Productions

Gus Austin

Thank you Merc

chartsandcoffee's picture

Merc,

We have recently implemented the Drigg module on Socialnews.biz. If you are interested in reading about the project, goto http://socialnews.biz/about

A tour is also available.