This is just narrative between Greg Knaddison (greggles), Matt Kelly (MattKelly), Michelle Cox (Michelle), and Chris Johnson (chrisxj), at the moment. Eventually it would be nice to parse it up into lists with details for each point, or some other structured way.
I was prompted to build this project by the repeated frustration I felt each time I tried to find modules to do various things. Often, it was simply trying to find a module I knew existed and what it did, but just couldn't remember the exact name. Other times it was trying to discover if a module existed which supplied functionality "X". And yet other times, it was trying to find the best module to provide functionality that I knew was supplied by several modules (e.g. have you tried figuring out which module or modules are best for providing in-line image insertion in D5 using an editor other than TinyMCE? A solution does exist. It's just hard to find!).
It's obviously needed in the community, as can be seen from the forums, irc channel, and this blog post from Dries: http://buytaert.net/drupal-org-wishlist [matt]
The solution seems to be to create a better module searching application and add to it the ability to rate and criticize the modules. The current drupal.org listing and taxonomy system is too cumbersome. And with hundreds of modules and a growing number, it's not getting any better.
Lastly, I think we can provide the Drupal community a valuable service by solving the above problems. And we might even produce two additional positive effects: (1) encourage better modules via the rating/critiques, and (2) boost Drupal's reputation around the world by making it easier for people to see the wide diversity and great depth in the contributed modules available. [chris]
Project metrics for drupal.org redesign
One of the big goals of the drupal.org redesign is to make it easier for end users to find the right modules for the site they're trying to build. With over 5,000 contributed modules, many of them providing similar functionality, it can be extremely difficult to choose. One method is to try to assess the "health" of the module, by how actively it's maintained, used, supported, etc.
One approach to gauging health is posted at Project ratings and reviews for drupal.org redesign. While that proposal deals with subjective factors, this post addresses objective facts about a module that can be computed and displayed for all projects hosted on drupal.org. While no single metric can tell you what module to use, and some knowledge will be required to make the best use of this data, it's important to make these statistics more readily available on drupal.org to empower users to make better decisions.
The redesign prototype for project pages includes the introduction of a sparkline showing the "Activity" for each project. The details of this activity chart weren't specified at a technical level during the design phase, but the spirit of the design is that they wanted more ways to visualize the health of a project. As we're implementing the redesign, we've been empowered to provide as many charts containing specific data we think will best help end users make sense of what's going on with a project. Read on for our specific proposal, including what metrics to compute, and some ideas on how those are going to be visualized on the new drupal.org
Read moreProject ratings and reviews for drupal.org redesign
One of the major new features proposed in the redesign site prototype for making it easier to find the right modules for end users is the introduction of Project ratings and reviews. This post is a proposal for how we're planning to implement these features as part of the redesign. If there's sufficient traction for this proposal, we could actually roll this out independently of the redesign theme launch itself.
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Metric for Modules Which Returns Maintainers Level of Engagement
Everyone I talk to is thrilled with the module usage stats provided now by d.o.
I have an idea for another metric that I think would be very helpful to people evaluating modules. The goal of this metric is to evaluate the level of engagement of the project maintainers in the project.
Number of commits and posts to issue queue by project maintainers/number of posts to issue queue by everyone else.
My vision for Drupal.org's project pages
What users are searching for outside of Drupal.org
I thought you guys might be interested in these search numbers from DrupalModules.com. It turns out they're very similar to what's being reported by Drupal.org. One thing to note, my data has been filtered for IP-uniqueness to prevent result spamming (intentional, or not), the Drupal.org data is just coming right out of the watchdog log unfiltered.
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Flag for "I've used this module"?
There's a possibility that flag.module will be used for project issue subscriptions. If we're using it already, I can think of a few other things we could do with it.
Although I'm skeptical about voting, one thing that'd be cool is the ability to see who's using a module. So I could flag projects as "I've used this module", then see who's used it, and with a little bit of work, we could have a "Users who used this modules also used these" block as well. And it'd be easy enough to do a "projects I use" tab on /downloads as well.
Read moreParsing .info files for dependencies
Idea came up on this issue (twice) http://drupal.org/node/265450
This information would be useful for a couple of reasons:
Showing dependencies automatically on project pages - some maintainers are kind enough to list them in the description, but what's in the .info file is the best bet.
Showing related modules - modules like token, views, voting API could show dependent modules, modules with dependencies could show other modules with the same dependencies (cck, jQuery UI).
Read moreProject taxonomy revamp proposal
Every week it seems like there's a new issue in the webmasters/issue queue about new taxonomy terms for projects, this is a sure sign that the existing categories don't fit current needs. An obvious issue is that some of the categories are huuuge, which means in some cases you're just as well off browsing the full modules list. Who wants to look through 414 'utility' modules? What does 'content display' even mean.
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Project module's hidden project metrics
I have just re-discovered the http://drupal.org/project/issues/statistics in d.o's user menu. Below of the overall project statistics you get a nice overview of total issues by project and status. After clicking through the pages and changing the table sorting to Total, and while still looking at rather meaningless statistics, this idea crossed my mind:
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Building Drupal Modules
This session will introduce Drupal users to the beauty that is creating custom modules. We will start out by doing an overview of what a module is, what it is composed of, and how modules interact with the Drupal core. The lesson quickly turns from lecture to hands-on when the basics are over and students code their modules and learn all about Drupal's hooks and API offerings.
This session will go over how to build and architecture a new custom Drupal module.
Who is this course for?
Read moreNew Community-Powered Drupal Module Review Site
Drupal Modules is a community-powered Drupal module review system I've been working on for about a year now. I'm happy to announce the site is finally open to the public!
Here's a brief list of what you can do on the site:
- Rate and review any module
- Compare modules to see which has the best features, documentation, etc
- Check how many downloads a module is getting
- Easily search modules and reviews for keywords
- Get automatic recommendations for similar modules
- And more!
Duplicate efforts?
See this node http://groups.drupal.org/node/7191 titled "Project Quality Metrics" in the Drupal.org redesign plan for the Drupal Association group. It looks like all that activity should either be here, or all the activity intended for this group should be there, i.e. duplicate efforts.
Read moreDesign document
Last updated by Chris Johnson on Wed, 2007-12-12 09:56
Drupal Module "Directory"
Greg Knaddison (greggles), Matt Kelly (MattKelly), Michelle Cox (Michelle), Chris Johnson (chrisxj)
Keep in mind this is just a rough draft comprised of dialog between the above people, so far.
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Project Quality Metrics on Drupal.org (meta document)
According to a survey of over 1,000 Drupal users, the most requested feature for Drupal.org is a recommendation system for the modules section. With the exponential proliferation of Drupal modules it's certainly easy to imagine why.
Because the discussion about this subject has been splintered into so many places, it was suggested (see here and here) to create a thread within the D.O. Redesign group in order to centralize the brainstorming, mockups, proposals, etc for this initiative.
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