Documentation pages for core modules

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chris55's picture

Coming back to drupal after taking a year's break I could NOT find the documentation pages for the core modules. It's taken me some time to find that if I want to find, say, documentation for the tracker module I need to type in drupal.org/documentation/modules/tracker.

I'm not at this point disputing the hierarchical layout of the basic documentation pages, but the core modules are scattered across a number of different books in a non-obvious way. There's a basic asymmetry between core modules and contributed modules: project/foo takes you straight to a contributed module and a new user finds this pretty quickly. But project/tracker has been deleted and not replaced by a redirect to the proper page.

Could, either, these pages be replaced by redirects or a clear statement put somewhere prominently at the start of the whole documentation to tell people the shortcut?

Chris

Comments

I'm confused - are you

arianek's picture

I'm confused - are you looking for the project pages or just the documentation pages?

All of the core module documentation pages should be at the url /documentation/modules/module-name as you'd noted above. Core modules don't have their own project pages because they are in core (and hence use the core issue queue, are only downloadable as part of core, etc.)

For better or worse, the docs are currently arranged in a task-oriented way, so there's no single area you can find them in.

reply

chris55's picture

I realise it's too much to ask that there be a specification of the modules in any sense, so yes, I'm simply looking for the documentation page. Most of the core modules started off as "projects" but no longer have this status although I assume there is a method, enforced somehow, to stop people submitting new projects with the same name.

I don't find your comment very helpful. The drupal documentation is as much a maze as most drupal sites and simply saying that's the way it is, ain't good enough. Unless you listen to problems people have you won't improve things.

The front page of the drupal site is a lot better than it was a year or two back. e.g. You can now search for a module by keyword. However that's limited to contributed modules not core modules. If I want to find the documentation about the taxonomy module for example, I have to go to the documentation page, guess which of 7 headings it might come under, look at the contents list, and if it's not at the top level, guess which major heading it might come under, etc. etc.

I realise that this discussion group isn't intended for this type of request, but it's the first time I've been to the groups site and it's hard to find one's way around that; if I hadn't subscribed to the thread I'd never have found my way back to this page.

Chris

Documentation team project

pillarsdotnet's picture

I'm building a page now.

Done.

thanks

chris55's picture

thanks for responding, pillarsdotnet.

As one site that hasn't yet upgraded to d7 because of various dependencies, I'm awed/dismayed by the number of 7 core modules! And most of the d7 links don't work whereas many of the d6 ones do (tho not the APIs).

It still doesn't help if I'm doing a search from the front page which is why I suggested putting a redirect on project/core_module as a quick fix for that. But it's a start.

Chris

Help module...

jhodgdon's picture

If you turn on the Help module inside your site, you will have access to pretty much the same information, plus each help page links (hopefully) to the drupal.org page that documents the core module.

Updated

pillarsdotnet's picture

Updated the page so that:

  • The "Issue queue" links are actually version-specific as the link title would suggest.
  • The modules that lack a documentation page are wrapped by the following link:<a title='No documentation page available'>

Thanks!

michelle's picture

That's a really useful page. Thanks for doing it. :)

Michelle

You're welcome.

pillarsdotnet's picture

I mostly generated the page by writing a script that searches for .info files in the latest git checkout for 6.x, 7.x, and 8.x, and does some web requests to see which modules have documentation pages available.

If someone thinks it would be useful, I can make such a script available to others.

Hiya - it would probably be

arianek's picture

Hiya - it would probably be useful if you could post this somewhere to aid with keeping the page up to date! Maybe post it in here? http://drupal.org/node/302146

Okay.

pillarsdotnet's picture

When I get a chance, I'll write a new script (the original was done at a bash prompt inside an emacs shell window) and post it.

Script posted

pillarsdotnet's picture

Posted an improved script at http://drupal.org/node/1290690 and updated the Core modules page accordingly.

I'm not sure how you want to update http://drupal.org/node/302146

There aren't any other tasks on that page that relate to updating d.o content by running a script.

Looking better now

pillarsdotnet's picture

After half a dozen updates, I'm pretty happy with the output, now.

picture

Fiable.biz's picture

This is a very useful page indeed. Thank you But I can't find the core "picture" module of Drupal 8.

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