[META] Analyzing Drupal.org content types

This issue and child issues that follow are based on the findings of the Content Strategy project performed by the Drupal Association staff in partnership with Forum One Communications during December 2014 - April 2015.

Analyzing content types

Taking areas of user tasks from #2481479: [META] Define major areas of user activity / tasks on Drupal.org and mapping existing content types to them shows that some of the content types are overused and for some user tasks there are no adequate tools /content types.

In particular the following content types are currently used for too many different use cases:
Book pages
Forum pages
User Groups

Book pages are used for:

• General documentation
  - Understanding Drupal
  -Site Building Guide
  - Installation Guide
  - Structure Guide
  - Administration & Security Guide
  - Mobile Guide
  - Multilingual Guide
  - Develop for Drupal
  - Theming Guide
  - Reference
  - Archive
• Project-specific documentation
  Documentation how to use specific modules, currently in various books.
• Tutorials
  Clear step-by-step how to guides. Currently in ‘Tutorials and site recipes’ book.
• Community instructions
  Most of the Getting Involved Guide.
• Informational Pages about Drupal and Drupal.org
  - About Drupal
  - Drupal.org Style Guide
  - Drupal.org Guides
  - Drupal.org Initiatives Archive
• Marketing content
  Drupal CMS Benefits
  Marketing content from About Drupal book

Forum pages are used for:

• Support
  Support forum
  Services forum: Hosting support
• 'Official' news & announcements
  General: News & Announcements
• Community posts & announcements
  General: News & Announcements
  General: Community Spotlight
• Security advisories
  Newsletters: Security Advisories
• Case studies
  General: Show off your Drupal site
• Events
  General: Events
• Group discussions
  General: General discussions
• Drupal Services
  Services: Paid Drupal Services

User groups are used for:

• Announcements
  Announcement-only groups (e.g. Core, Governance)
• Projects based groups
  Groups used to organize work around contrib projects and distributions
  (e.g. Rules, Panopoly)
• Working Groups / Initiatives
  Groups for official and non-official community initiatives (e.g. WSCII, Mobile, Multilingual).
• Local User Groups
  Regional user groups, for a city, area, country, etc.
  (e.g. Portland DUG, Italy, Spain)
• Interest Groups
  Groups around software and non-software interests, and general discussions
  (e.g. Usability, Behat, DevOps, Women in Drupal)

Additional needs uncovered via user research workshops

• Videos
  Browsable and searchable recordings of DrupalCon and DrupalCamps sessions, webcasts hosted by the Drupal Association, etc.
• Marketing Focused Case Studies
  Promotion-focused professionally written case studies of high profile Drupal sites.
• Tools to help discover content user might be interested in
  Curated ‘Topic’ pages to surface most relevant content on specific topic. Well designed taxonomy term pages which enable discovery of related content.
• Training Opportunities
  Browsable listing of training events and opportunities, including Global Training Days.
• Planet
  Browsable archive of Planet posts on Drupal.org Posts connected to user and org profiles of their authors.

Summary

Single content type is often used for too many very different use cases, which require different field structure, layout, permissions and access restrictions.

At the same time single use case is often met by multiple content types, making it unclear for users (especially Newcomers and Learners) to know which content type to use for X.

For recommendations and proposed solutions see child issues.