Drupal has many (thousands of) modules and themes that make it an attractive platfrom to use. But often researching modules and themes takes longer than to build them into a solution. Here are a few suggestions for how the new d.o could help people find modules and themes more quickly:
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A list of modules by category, where you get a page with all the modules in that category (not like the current category list with a pager). Please retain the current listing of all modules - a text search in the browse through this page is often the best way to find things.
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A list of the best rated modules in a category
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It would be great if the community could tag the modules and themes - that way over time it would be easier to use the community's collective wisdom to find what one is looking for. The tagging mechanism is particularly useful for Themes which are difficult to classify to begin with.
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The summary of each item (theme or module) should contain links to the author, demo, average rating, most popular tags for that item, number of open issues and the number of downloads (per version/total) for the module or theme.
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Themes should have one or more of the following searchable properties: fixed width, variable width, fluid, centered, single column, two column, three column, right sidebar, left sidebar etc.
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A mechanism to search by Tag or characteristics, maybe even a tag cloud
Comments
Tagging for site recipes
I was JUST thinking this yesterday. While modules are grouped into categories, they're not very useful for putting together something like site recipes. For example, the modules you'd want for a band website or social networking site are scattered across multiple categories. Being able to tag them as good for a certain type of site or desired outcome would be very useful.
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{ Drupal Themes from TopNotchThemes } Gorgeous Drupal 5 & 6 designs with Views/Panels 2 support, plus Ubercart themes!
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{ TopNotchThemes | Fusion Drupal Themes }
This is what Installation
This is what Installation profiles are for. We seem to forget about these. But I'm in agreement that module users should be able to suggest tags for the module. SF allows this for a project.
Installation profiles are a
Installation profiles are a far cry from easily tagging modules :) I keep an eye on the state of installation profiles often and hope that things like the API for creating them get easier, but there should be an option somewhere between searching module description text and install profiles.
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{ Drupal Themes from TopNotchThemes } Gorgeous Drupal 5 & 6 designs with Views/Panels 2 support, plus Ubercart themes!
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{ TopNotchThemes | Fusion Drupal Themes }
I am a fan of tagging too.
I am a fan of tagging too. Tagging really helps.
Netlink Technologies Ltd
http://shyamala-drupal.blogspot.com/
Shyamala
Unimity Solutions
Tagging
I wrote up an in-depth proposal for reorganising the existing project categories and adding free tagging here: http://groups.drupal.org/node/11996 - please follow up there with any further ideas.
Module Subscriptions
Is it possible to allow logged-in users to enable a checkbox for all of the Modules they are interested in and add to a "My Modules" page that allows email alerts or RSS feeds for the selected releases?
Many modules are in various states of alpha, beta and RC development, and it's not always easy to track.
This method would provide customized update alerts for each user.
Having the choice of whether an alert is produced for every change, security alerts, or just on final release would be nice to.
Some modules I don't like to download until they are final releases, and this feature would help track when they are safe to install.
Apologies if somewhat off-topic....