This thread from D.o discussed the amalgamation of Decisions and Advanced Poll seems relevant to this group's discussion here.
| Statistics as at | July 12th | 5.x | 6.x | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Decisions | 23 | 210 | 233 | |
| Advanced Poll | 550 | 741 | 1,291 |
ezra-g here:
I'm working on a project that is potentially interested in enhancing one of these two modules. Here's my initial research into which one to chose:
Data:
| .. | Advanced Poll | Decisions |
|---|---|---|
| Started | 10/8/2006 | 2/6/2006 |
| Last Commit | 35 wk ago | 13 wks ago |
| Drupal 6 Release | Dev release | Official Release 2009-08-19 |
| Current Usage | 1698 | 446 |
| Approx Usage Nov '09 | 600 | 100 |
| Bugs | 63 | 7 |
| Bugs/User | 27 | 64 |
| Depends on VotingAPI Yes | Yes | |
| Scheduled Open/Closing of voting | yes | yes |
| Restrict voting to specific users | yes | yes |
| Seeking co-maintainers | yes | yes |
From reading up on the following threads:
http://drupal.org/node/101622
http://drupal.org/node/481362
http://drupal.org/node/481360
My Initial Impressions:
It seems like Decisions was created first, but the maintainers were unable to work together and Advanced Poll was created. Often, but not always, a dramatic difference in usage statistics can be a compelling reason to chose one module over another especially when they share similar architecture (both store votes in the VotingAPI with an 'option' value type). On the other hand, the fact that the port to D6 appears complete for Decisions and not for Advanced Poll makes Decisions feel more complete, but I'll have to examine the two modules more closely to see if that's really justified. If the over 1,200 Drupal 6 users were to move from AdvPoll to Decisions, I would expect there would be at some migration tools would have to be written.
Comments
More information
As the maintainer of Decisions, I feel I can help in bringing in more information in the comparison.
For me, the clear reason to go with Decisions is that it's actively maintained. While we have less features than advpoll, most of those features could easily be merged in if someone just spent the time to sit down and do it. The mising features are:
At the technical level, I tried to keep decision modes isolated as modules so that administrators could easily disable those modes. In the future, I'm looking at basing decisions on D7 fields and making decisions more of an algorithm engine that plugs into other tools (fivestar, mediumvote, etc) while still providing its own content type and user interface. (See also this discussion)
advpoll hasn't seen a release in almost two years (last official release in february 2008) and has no official Drupal 6 release (snapshot release in december 2008).
decisions has releases almost as soon as we get new code in, and we've had a D6 release since july 2008, stabilised in july 2009 and we've had 3 more releases since then (last release in august, since then I've been rather busy with Aegir ;)).
decisions is looking forward to the D7 port and is sponsored and supported by one of the oldest Drupal shops around (Koumbit.org) which has made sure the users were not let down in the long term. Koumbit has sponsored about every single decisions release out there and a big majority of the code (which also constitutes a good chunk of the advpoll code, btw).
We've been looking for sponsors to help with the development of new features, but so far that hasn't happened, so my work has been limited to patch review and release engineering.
I acknowledge the fact that advpoll has a bigger install base. I explain that by the lack of AJAX support in Decisions, mostly (people like bells and whistles). Note however, that we grew quite a bit in recent times (since july 12th, we went from 233 to 446 installs, a 91% increase, while advpoll went from 1,291 to 1,698 installs, a 31% increase). Arguably, it's harder to proportionally grow advpoll's install base since it's already bigger, but still, we were pretty happy with the results this summer.
I hope that we can catch up in the long run, but I'm not too worried about that, we're each going our separate ways and growing in our own manner. I prefer to lead a strong and steady project than crash and burn as a rock star. ;)
Pollfield?
I would love to see the comparison between Advanced poll, Decisions and Pollfield.
Pollfield is slowly growing (365), development for version 6.x started in mid June, it is in active development. Since it's CCK based it seems to go in your direction (you mentioned D7 fields.)
A key difference between
A key difference between Pollfield and both Decisions and AdvPoll is that Pollfield does not use the votingAPI to store results.
I guess there are five
I guess there are five modules for voting systems in general: Poll (core), AdvPoll, Decisions, Pollfield and somehow Webform, all of them can be used to create a poll but with different options and capacity. AdvPoll, and Decisions are the best but very buggy. Putting the effort on one module can be serviceable.
what a messnice example of
what a mess
nice example of how things can go wrong when there's a low level of cooperation
Pollfield is an approach at trying to solve this mess with advpoll and decision
see this issue
Luís Pedro Algarvio
Drupal and DevOps Developer, Evangelist & Trainer
lp.algarvio.org
I thought dQuarks looked very
I thought dQuarks looked very promising, but I simply can't figure out how to disable this annoying insisting on questions having a correct answer. :-(