Support for Drupal 7 is ending on 5 January 2025—it’s time to migrate to Drupal 10! Learn about the many benefits of Drupal 10 and find migration tools in our resource center.For every project on Drupal.org, there are two tags under the "Project information" heading known as "Maintenance status" and "Development status".
If a user clicks on these to learn more, he/she is taken to the tag's taxonomy term page. There are 5 "maintenance" terms and 4 "development terms".
However, of these 9 terms, only 3 have tag description. Not having a tag description is unhelpful to a user that is browsing a project and want to find out what a specific status term entails.
There is, however, a community wiki page - https://drupal.org/node/1066982 where a description of all the relevant terms can be found.
As an aside, I will say that I think that the explanation of the meaning of these tags should be considered official documentation and should not be subject to arbitrary changes. Therefore, I don't think this information belongs on a wiki page.
However, as a stopgap soluntion, to make sure users browsing project pages at Drupal.org have access to the documentation that expands the meaning of the status tags, all 9 tags should be given a "tag description" that contains a link to the community wiki page.
After this stopgap solution is in place, here is the tasks I think should be carried out:
- All nine project status tags should be given an official tag description. Descriptions assigned:
Maintenance statusActively maintained Maintainers strive to actively monitor issues and respond in a timely manner. Minimally maintained Maintainers monitor issues, but fast responses are not guaranteed. Seeking co-maintainer(s) Maintainers are looking for help reviewing issues. Seeking new maintainer The current maintainers are looking for new people to take ownership. Unsupported Not supported (i.e. abandoned), and no longer being developed. Learn more about dealing with unsupported (abandoned) projects Development status
Under active development This project is under active development. Maintenance fixes only Considered feature-complete by its maintainers. No further development No longer developed by its maintainers. Obsolete Use of this project is deprecated. - There should be a page (easily created with Views) that lists the official project status tag descriptions.
- When the two previous points are in place, the link to "definitions of maintenance and development statuses" on the project page should point to this view, not to the community documentation wiki.
- The link on http://drupal.org/node/314492 to these definitions should link to this this view (an any other that currently points to https://drupal.org/node/1066982).
- Node https://drupal.org/node/1066982 should have the defintions removed, and instead refer users to the view suggested in point #2 above.
I think only task #2 and #3 need to be carried out by the infrastructure team. Task #1, #4 and #5 looks like something the Documentation WG should do.
Comments
Comment #1
gisleLinked to task posted in the webmasters queue.
Comment #2
gisleMade quotes blockquotes.
Comment #3
drummFor #2, the new view should be exported to a feature in drupalorg.
For #3, the string is in the
drupalorg_projectsfeature.Comment #4
joachim CreditAttribution: joachim commented> All nine project status tags should be given an official tag description.
> There should be a page (easily created with Views) that lists the official project status tag descriptions.
Term descriptions are great, and the terms that are missing them should be fixed.
But I don't think that replacing a documentation page with a view is a good idea. I think it's best if the place where the meaning of these is documented is easily editable, so that the definitions can be refined and expanded on when necessary. If we move the definition of what these mean to the tags, then they are fixed, and changing them requires a support request and an admin user to do the work.
To prove my point: this issue has been open over 6 months. Any user can edit the page at https://www.drupal.org/node/314492 rather than wait for developers to implement this.
Comment #5
gislejoachim wrote:
I agree that nine months is a long time to get this sorted out. However:
If there is a general agreement that a community wiki page is the way to move forward, then I believe that the tag descriptions for the status code should link to that wiki page. Currently, there is very little or no guidance in these tag descriptions (for example, Minimally maintained and 5 others have none).
I've added a stopgap suggestion to the issue summary (as it seems to take considerable time to resolve where to finally put this information): Place a simple link to the community wiki page in all the 9 status tag descriptions. Doing this should be uncontroversial as it will improve on the current situation with very sparse or no guidance in these descriptions. Inserting such a link would not take more than a few minutes for someone with edit access. I am just an ordinary user here, so I can't do it. However, I assume people with a webmaster role has the rights to do this? Or is the Documentation WG the right place to make a request for such an edit to the tags?
Comment #6
drummThe term definitions ideally should be there when you need them rather than on a separate page. For example, the form could switch to a radio button widget and have descriptions for each button.
When viewing the project page, the short description could be right there, with a link to expand or go to more information.
Comment #7
joachim CreditAttribution: joachim commented> For example, the form could switch to a radio button widget and have descriptions for each button.
I think that's rather ambitious... a follow-up maybe? :)
The edit form currently says "For definitions of maintenance and development statuses, see Maintenance of your project." -- but clearly since that help text was added, someone has changed the documentation page... oh dear, that appears to have been me -- here's the log message I left:
> moved on maintenance & development status back to the original page in the contrib modules section, left a link. this ensures we only have one copy of this. See https://drupal.org/node/2183935 for background.
-- and that issue I reference is #2183935: docs node on project status has been moved to the archive book!. Looks like I made a mess :(
So first thing -- restore the content to that docs page, and clean up the other docs page so we still have just one copy.
That's ok but that page is only easily visible to maintainers who edit their project.
What we also need is for ordinary users to be able to reach it.
The obvious question to ask is: do we really need to be able to access the taxonomy term listing for these terms? How about just replacing the link for these terms with a link to the docs page?
Comment #8
joachim CreditAttribution: joachim commentedHmm ok, having had another look at the docs pages in question, I'm going to say my decision to move the content was right, and that it's the link on the project node edit form that needs to be changed, because:
- the page where the content is now, https://www.drupal.org/node/1066982, "Maintenance and development status for projects" is a page in the Site Building Guide. It's part of a larger section on contrib modules aimed at users -- there are sibling pages on evaluating modules, comparing modules, and so on.
- the page that the issue node form refers to, https://www.drupal.org/node/314492, "Maintenance of your project", is part of the Getting Involved Guide. It's part of a larger section for project maintainers.
I think it's best for this information to be easily accessible to users of modules.
So I think what should now be done is:
- change the link that's in the issue node edit form to point to https://www.drupal.org/node/1066982
- add a description to the terms that don't have one
- hack the term fields on issue nodes so they link through to that rather than the core taxonomy listing, and print the term description beneath them
- add a comment to the body text in https://www.drupal.org/node/1066982 to say that this node is linked to from project issues and so its content should not be moved (!!)
Comment #9
gisleJoachim wrote:
The three taxenomy terms that already have descriptions have rather sparse descriptions, and some of these also convey a different meaning than the descriptions of the same terms that appear in the community wiki: https://www.drupal.org/node/1066982
I think steps should be taken to make sure these descriptions stay in sync. And the best way to make them stay in sync is to maintain them as fleshed out tag descriptions, and to replace the community wiki page with a view that just print out the official tag descriptions.
Comment #10
joachim CreditAttribution: joachim commentedI really think that is overkill. The short description for each status is not going to change much, ever, and we use a documentation page for describing the Priority and Status fields on issue nodes.
Comment #11
drummComment #12
drummAdding term descriptions used to the issue summary. Please update if the copy can be improved.
Comment #13
drummHTML cleanup
Comment #14
drummComment #15
drummHTML cleanup
Comment #16
drummSpelling fix and clarification for Obsolete & No further development
Comment #17
drummDeploying this shortly. The changes are:
Comment #19
drummThis has been deployed.
Comment #21
Wim Leers👍