Here are some directories in CVS that do not get any love and by love I mean downloads.
It could be for lots of reasons why they are not downloaded, but the bottom line is that they are not popular and could be considered for removal from CVS and/or Drupal.org project pages. These are only the directories in contributions for modules/, themes/ theme-engines/ and translations/
EDIT: This is a post in Drupal for Evil, so it's a little on the negative slant as tongue-in-cheek, but the point is that these modules:
- Might be great and need more advertising
- Might be in need of adoption by a new maintainer
- Might be ready to get trashed
This is one measure of the quality/importance of the module. We have imperfect measures of quality, so we have to use things like Downloads as a proxy for the importance among a basket of other measures. Nobody is going to go out tomorrow and use this list to do an rm -rf on these puppies, so don't freak out if your favorite module that is TEH ROXXXORRZ is on this list, ok?
Comments
Where's Drupal's removal policy?
I own at least one module (review) on that page and I'd love to get it wiped so someone else could use the project name.
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Good question - I think you just delete the project node and remove any files from the CVS folder and/or the CVS folder itself.
You could post a warning "I'm killing this module in January 2007" so that people have fair warning.
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Knaddison Family | mmm Beta Burritos
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
Many of these projects are
Many of these projects are abandoned, but at least one of the modules on that list (provisionator) is new -- less than 48 hours old --
Maybe a combination of 0 downloads and no commits/issues within the last X months would provide a more nuanced view of projects that could get the axe.
Cheers,
Bill
FunnyMonkey
Flawed analysis
While the suggestion that some of these could be removed probably has some merit, the analysis is flawed.
First, it only counts downloads. I rarely download modules, nor does my employer. We almost always get them by using CVS. I would imagine many active drupal implementors and developers do likewise, but don't really know.
Second, as was pointed out, some modules are actually very new. taxonomy_explorer is on this list. It's new in the past month. It will get rolled out to around 50 sites where I work as we migrate from 4.6 to 4.7. We won't download it a single time.
Incidentally, why wasn't the list ordered in some useful fashion, like alphabetically and/or by type? It's hard to search it this way.
I too have checked out a
I too have checked out a couple of these in the last month.
dave hansen-lange
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Dave Hansen-Lange
Director of Technical Strategy, Advomatic.com
Pronouns: he/him/his
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Thanks for the constructive criticism. I have resorted the list by type and then directory name.
It's a nuanced thing for sure, but the problem is that while you may be comfortable doing a CVS checkout and looking at the code, how does "my mom" judge the quality of a module? She has to look at externally visible characteristics like the number of downloads, last commit, etc. This is one part of that puzzle.
We have easy access to only certain pieces of information: the number of downloads is available across all modules. So here is some analysis based on that.
It would be better to combine this data with an analysis of
And there are issues in project module to do all (or most of) these things. But in the mean time, this is a quick indicator that I could do in a couple hours.
I also made them link off to their Drupal.org projects - if that doesn't work right...well that's another potential quality indicator...
Regards,
Greg
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Knaddison Family | mmm Beta Burritos
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
Housekeeping...
I've got to figure at least a couple might be kept around for posterity's sake -- Ber's node aggregator, for example. In a crazy way, it makes me wonder about the proliferation of 5.0 modules and what direction that will lead -- I have no complaints, but it seems that a lot of modules in general are released as stand-alone add-ons that are better merged into libraries or something.
Suddenly visualizes a module for "not quite stand-alone-module-add-ins" and slinks away
How did you get your download data?
I'd love to have information about how often my projects are downloaded, it would definitely help me decide which I should focus on.
Dave
nice timing
I just posted a wiki page about numbers for marketing. It has links to the sources for this data - http://groups.drupal.org/node/6551
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