Posted by rjleigh on March 17, 2008 at 4:24am
Not sure if this has been widely publicized yet, but the new drupal modules site is operational. Hopefully this will develop into a meaningful way to evaluate the quality and adoption of contributed modules. It is outside of drupal.org, though, so maybe it will not really reflect actual drupal use.
The module finder is way cool, though. check it out!
Comments
It'd be better to see this effort as part of d.o redesign
If you are interested in having module evaluation as part of the drupal.org infrastructure, now is the time: http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-org-redesign-analysis
Join in, and get involved there. You'll get the opportunity to work within the community to build out the infrastructure, and learn a whole lot more about Drupal in the process.
My concern with sites like drupalmodules (dot) com (and I'll keep this brief):
It fragments the documentation efforts; and
It has the potential to be gamed by people looking to increase their Search Engine visibility, as opposed to actually review modules -- this article, entitled Write a Review, get linked! seems to suggest that as a real possibility.
There are a host of other reasons, but I promised to keep it brief :)
Cheers,
Bill
FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers
FunnyMonkey
I hope you FunnyMonkey guys
I hope you FunnyMonkey guys are going to sign up to do some panels at our little DrupalCampPDX. You guys do great work and have plenty of good things to say and good sites to demo.
Grant
Sala kahle,
Grant
I would love to get down to
I would love to get down to the event, but I'm going to be out of town, returning May 9th. Holy jetlag, batman!
RE: "You guys do great work and have plenty of good things to say and good sites to demo." -- Thanks! We're actually going to be launching a few sites in the weeks before I leave, and I'd love to talk about the work we've done --
Also, part of the reason I was (selfishly :) ) advocating for a weekday event is that, on the weekends, I try and minimize the time I spend working in order to spend time with the family -- I tend to work pretty long hours during the week, and need to keep an eye on the work/life balance.
With that said, I'm going to be trying to carve out the time to actually get to the PDX meetups -- I've been to a bunch over the last few years, and they're always a blast.
Cheers,
Bill
FunnyMonkey
Tools for Teachers
FunnyMonkey
me too!
I would also like to see an "official" version, and also have a healthy suspicion about accuracy of any ratings system (in OR out of drupal.org).
And the fear of fragmentation of documentation is also very real. Some major projects have moved documentation off site, which I have mixed feelings about. Ubercart, for example, maintains their own site - in that case it provides a very readable, clear presentation of the information in a way that I have NOT seen duplicated by any d.o documentation.
But it has come up again and again with folks new to Drupal - looking at the current d.o module lists is simply mind-boggling. May a bit of healthy competition can spur a more community directed effort in a timely manner.
I posted this because it's also hard for newbies (or anyone not obsessively following drupal news) to keep up with latest developments, and I'd like to see this group become a source for 'highlights' from the world of drupal, just to help folks climb the learning curve.
If the consensus is that this isn't the proper venue for that sort of post, I'll quit.
-Roger
While I agree with both you
While I agree with both you and Bill that a module page is somewhat questionable and risky, I also think the answer to a big hole in the process is to plug it. I think that selecting modules has always been a Drupal weakness and that a rating site or something better was needed. I'd personally like to see a bin system something like Linux (fully approved and fully compliant modules in one bin, approved but non-ideal modules in a second bin, all other modules save bad ones in a third bin (including those not yet reviewed, but possibly putting unreviewed modules into their own bin), and finally a "use if you feel lucky" bin). However you need something like reviews to show warnings about potential conflicts, where two otherwise excellent modules step on each other and cause each other problems.
To me module-rating should have been handled by Drupal in an official capacity, long ago. Responsibility should have been taken for helping folks choose modules as all too often I speak to someone who gave up on Drupal because a bad module broke their site. In the absence of this I'm personally grateful to others for doing this as I had considered creating a similar page myself, though I would not have done nearly as well with it (mostly just 5-star). Yes, there is the potential for abuse, but the entire open source world is filled with the potential for abuse. I think we have to give something a shot and then plug the holes as we go along, rather than simply avoiding an important task because of the risks. And in risk versus benefit I think this new module page probably has far more benefit than risk (time will tell).
Thanks for telling us about it.
Sala kahle,
Grant
How stuff gets done
I wouldn't be surprised to see that the site in question is used as a model and perhaps even codebase for an official Drupal.org version of it.
Look at how many parts of Drupal were written as code outside of Drupal. The installer from Civicspace, for example was something that someone decided to go ahead and do, and now its in Drupal when everyone saw how it worked.
Drupal is, and has always been a do-ocracy, so it really saddens me that the people that aren't taking any steps to solve the problem are criticizing the individual who decided to go ahead and build it himself and hope he learns something in the process.