Rename "module" to a more generic term so people new to Drupal understand what it means

There was also some discussion in #1164760: [meta] New users universally did NOT understand that you can extend Drupal.

I think it will be less effort to explain what modules are then to rename them. I collected a list of words used by other projects, there doesn't seem to be any clear winner:

This one is will have serious complications. I imagine it to be equally hard as deciding to rename Drupal itself. How about evangelizing (not actually renaming) both modules and themes as "extensions" instead of "projects". Think of it as a matter of context. For developers and internally they'll still be referred as "projects", but when addressing non-coding audience (for example in documentation, screencasts, DrupalCons etc), we call them "extensions". That would be in tandem with what we have in our "Start with Drupal" page so we can have some sort of consistency:

...but I have to say that I really like how Ruby has "gems". Perhaps drupal should also have "drops" or "droplets" :D

I just posted a reply in #538904-339: D8UX: Redesign Modules Page and as I was typing:

... Perhaps an abstract list of "features" (unfortunately a namespace already taken by contrib) that people can turn on/off would be more streamlined. ...

It is really unfortunate indeed. The Features project already has over 62k users, so renaming it would be all hell broken loose. In a perfect world though, that project would be renamed to something like "Use Cases" or "Scenarios" and we'd be free to use "features" in core. If not for entirely renaming the "modules" term to "features" (all documentation and drupal lingo confusion involved), then we could at least promote a so titled admin section and move module and them admin under that. That would certainly make sense to people and #1164760: [meta] New users universally did NOT understand that you can extend Drupal & #1167458: New users do not know to click on 'Modules' to extend their site would be -mostly- solved.

NO
"gems" though cute, is ridiculously domain-specific, and is not going to help "dummies" guess what it is. Which is the OP example.

"Extensions" I could live with, but is no less jargon than "module" is. As it is, I imagine "extensions" as being small enhancements to functionality while "modules" are new functionality. Many Drupal modules blur that line, but "extension" feels a little weaker.

I live in the commercial/real-world where we have "Feature requests". Which mostly boil down to enabling a "module" and configuring it - which is technically a really good description of what "features" does. So I think their namespace is pretty accurate and should not be diluted.

The user-testing problems referred to above are largely a limitation of world-view. Who knew that adding functionality was even possible if you'd been expecting to deal the hand that was dealt to you? How many of those test users installed browser plugins on a regular basis or extended their Office suite with the free add-ons that are available. Or thought that was part of the test? If you think that what is presented to you is the beginning and the end of your experience, then even asking for more is not a thing that people will do. Especially if overwhelmed somewhat at first.

I disagree entirely that the problem would be "mostly solved" unless the replacement terminology was an order of magnitude more obvious - and none of the suggestions so far are more than a couple of degrees either way. Depending somewhat on personal background.

KEEP the distinction between themes and modules. Merging them will help no-one.

Any field has its terminology. An English speaker, or English-learner can get the idea that a software product has extras and that the extras are called X within one page of documentation. It would hurt to make that terminology more generic, less precise (less accurate, less useful) just to appeal to wordpress-refugees who can't understand Page one of the what-am-I-doing manual (Though I admit I had to actually *search* from the front page to find that page).

-1 from me on this. They've been called modules for over a decade and changing it now just because some new people may need a little extra help to learn the term is the wrong approach. Drupal is modular software and "modules" makes perfect sense as a name. This isn't a Drupalism. If we currently called them "drops" then I would be more inclined to say switching to something not so Drupal specific is a good idea. But "modules" is already a good generic name.

Michelle

Yeah, I'm not keen on renaming the modules to something else either. I just thought that if we decided to do so, then "drops" would be cool (I agree that not useful though). Now, if the goal was to solve the other issues, then I suggested to not entirely rename them but simply introduce a common admin place for both modules & themes. This admin section titled "Features" stroke me as a proper thing but now that I see your comments, perhaps "extras" is equally good to communicate the purpose.

It is easy to learn what a Drupal module is... If a developer wants to create a Drupal site a little RTFM will let him understand what a module is in minutes.

I do not see the logic in renaming modules because some users are too lazy to read a bit of documentation.

Also plugins in Drupal is usually third party javascripts, php code, wysiwyg editors etc... That is ussualy used with a module and is installed in places like 'sites/all/libraries'

Again true. It seems that most of the ideas we came up with for a new name for what we call "modules" are simply not worth the mess. So, I think this is heading to being closed as a "won't fix", but let's just leave it for a week or two to see what others think before closing it.

+1 for closing. When I started with Drupal I expected to have to discover drupal terminology, rather than assuming terminology from my background. There are other, more important, UI issues than this.

The UI needs to convey "Add new features and functionality". This is the most clear and unambiguous non-technical explanation. Module, although technically correct, in my opinion, it has no meaning in common vernacular.

+1 for renaming "Modules" but instead of personal opinions, let's attempt to qualify the suggestions using public data sources.

I searched for "addon,app,plugin,extension,module, mod" and "gem, egg"

As reported by wordcount.org, http://wordcount.org/main.php

WordCount™ is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonness. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is.

WordCount data currently comes from the British National Corpus®, a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent an accurate cross-section of current English usage. WordCount includes all words that occur at least twice in the BNC®. In the future, WordCount will be modified to track word usage within any desired text, website, and eventually the entire Internet.

It has won a webby award, so I believe it to be a reputable source. "addon" and "plugin", hyphenated or not, doesn't appear in their dictionary thus no results are provided for those words below.

Ranks:
1. extension #2792
2. module #3005
3. egg #3622
4. mod #13187
5. gem #15353
6. app #22959

Google Trends.

With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most.

It only compares five terms at a time.
http://www.google.com/trends/?q=plugin,+addon,+extension,+app,+module&ct...

Despite the Wordcount stats, Google Trends "app" is the #1 term searched. Though, we can probably agree, "app" is a different meaning than "extension".

In the US and UK, "extension" is #2, "plugin" is #3. Worldwide, "plugin" is #2, "extension" is #3. "Module" is a distant 4th in both cases, but above "gem" and "addon".

"addon" is a much more common spelling than "add-on" hyphenated.

Google Books Ngram

When you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books (e.g., "British English", "English Fiction", "French") over the selected years.

It searches books from 1800-2008 and is case-sensitive and hyphen sensitive.

Uppercase, a very close race between the first three terms.
http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Addon%2CApp%2CPlugin%2CExte...
#1, Extension
#2, App
#3, Module
#4, Mod
#5, Plugin

Lowercase, a lot of variance, "extension" dominates above all other terms.
http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=addon%2Capp%2Cplugin%2Cexte...
#1, extension
#2, module
#3 or #4, mod/app (very close)
#5, plugin

Variations on "plugin,Plugin,plug-in,Plug-in,Plug-In,PLUGIN,plug-In"

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=plugin%2CPlugin%2Cplug-in%2...
#1, plugin (clear winner)
#2, Plugin
#3, PLUGIN

With the "cute" terms. "egg" should probably be thrown out due to it probably referring more to the food.
http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=gem%2Cegg%2Cmod%2Cextension...

Variations on "Addon,addon,Add-on,add-on,Add-On,add-On,ADDON,ADD-ON"
http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Addon%2Caddon%2CAdd-on%2Cad...
#1, addon (clear winner)
#2, Addon
#3, Add-on

"module" does a lot better on Ngram. I believe there may be more technical reference books in their database.

I think "extension" as a search term is ranked higher due to its use in a government context and in technical books. Ex. Harry Reid gave an extension to Congress bill SR-235.

Personally, I prefer "addon", but based on all the data, I would choose "extension" above all words. It's clearly the most common word among "addon,app,plugin,extension,module".

Extension isn't very clear. It's a thing that extends... which isn't the same as a module. Doesn't a theme extend? So we have extensions and themes? What about other stuff? An install profile extends quite a bit. What if it's just a simple API that is used by another "extension"? Technically it's an extension because it's extending the API but not really in the same sense as the full "extension".

I don't see any benefit over "module". If anything, it's more confusing.

I don't agree that the amount of times a word has been used is of any use here. I'm sure "drop" is used quite frequently but that doesn't mean we should switch to it.

Michelle

If you want to googlefight it, then "extra" beats
extension" 5:1

As a documentation writer, I naturally would prefer using a specific, more precise word than a fuzzy generic one where there is a choice. And if that word may be seen as rare, it might get covered with an explanation in the first paragraph or a link to the glossary.

I quite like working within a smaller namespace, as you'll find that if you web-search for, eg "gallery module" then results are pretty good. Suggesting a rename would dilute the findability of a half-decade of blogs and tips online.

The data in #11 might be useful if it actually reflected drupal users(deigners, site builders, etc) instead of a large part of the english speaking world. What is the Japanese equivalent of 'module' and what is its meaning in that context. 'module' is a technical term in the drupal context. Wordpress, Concrete, Joomla, Firefox, etc. all have their own context. I just don't understand what is expected to be gained by changing the name. In the extreme case of someone who has never built a web site should we pick a term from the technical language context of PC applications like Word? Most of the words suggested here might be better used to lead new drupal users to the drupal concept of a 'module' than to replace the term itself. I think you would have had the same discussion if drupal had historically used the term 'features' instead of 'modules'

Our target audience is end users, webmasters, content editors, copywriters, bloggers, and non-technical users. There are more of them than there are of us.. designers, site builders, and programmers. And they pay our bills.

I think if we could get Jen Lampton and Bojhan to do a couple rounds of A/B testing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/B_testing), and measure the time-to-task-completion and ask users about their mental impressions. We will have hard data as to which is the better approach - if any.

If we can statistically show that end users are faster or come closer to correctly guessing what "Extensions" does, I would consider that a win.

We must be open to improvement and data driven when it comes to #D8UX usability. "Modules" is not a sacred cow

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_cow_(idiom)

Another plus for "extra" is that it is "international". I can only speak for Greek, Italian & Spanish. In these languages "extra" translates/means "extra" and when that word is used in a sentence, it needs no explanation or clarification (even though it is a "borrowed" word and has respective translations in these languages). Is this a fact for other languages too?

Just to make it clear: I am still strongly against changing the name "modules" for all the serious reasons mentioned above by all commenters. But if it is to be changed to something meaningful, then I vote for "extras". I still insist that we should rather introduce the new term as a common place under which modules and themes "live" in the admin UI. IMO it will greatly improve Drupal's extendability discovery in the UI with minimum implications (since we don't actually rename "modules" - we simply change their location in the UI so that users can find their way).

I guess what I mean to say is that we don't necessarily need to rename "modules" (all over the place: code/UI/documentation) in order to explain to people what these "things" are and what they do. Since we can't ignore the problem of people not grasping the idea straight away either, then how about instead "luring" them to a place that "teaches" them about modules. So, should we consider changing the scope of this issue from suggesting to rename a well-established standard to streamlining the UI by introducing a commonly understood term?

My greater idea here is that we can introduce a tour that would be optionally available to users right after Drupal installation. Users that are already familiar with Drupal (the concept, the lingo, the UI) could simply hit the "Take me to my site's first page" link/button (pretty much what we have now) while newcomers could click on a new "Take the tour to find out what you can do with Drupal!" link/button. This tour would be a series of step-by-step tasks. One of these tasks would be to visit the "Extras" admin section (holding links to the theme admin & the modules admin pages + some help text explaining in short what these "things" are - for more info it'd link to d.o documentation). To successfully complete this task, users would have to go through some level-of-experience based tasks (Think video game tutorial walkthroughs here):

Beginner level:
- Enable an existing module (and see some magic happen!!)
- Enable an existing theme (and see more magic happen!!)
- Disable one or both of these test "extras" (if they don't like their magic)

...by now we already got them to understand that there are "extras" that can be used to extend drupal ;)

Intermediate level:
- Download, extract/install and finally enable a new theme (downloaded from d.o)
- Perhaps do the same with a module.
- Perhaps also update an existing module/theme that is out of date.

...by now they also understand that there are "extras" included in "core" and also in "contrib" - another two drupal terms explained by example ;)

Expert level:
- Take them to documentation where they can start creating their own theme.
- Take them to documentation where they can start creating their own module.

...get people more involved in d.o and with the community ;)

Our target audience is end users, webmasters, content editors, copywriters, bloggers, and non-technical users.

No it isn't. These people have no need to know what modules are called. All they need to know is how to use the functionality the people who have built their site have given them.

Michelle

This looks like a fork of #1164760: [meta] New users universally did NOT understand that you can extend Drupal. Really what it boils down to is this:

1) Changing the word "modules" wholesale is extremely difficult.
2) Changing the label for the menu item that takes you to the modules page is extremely easy.

I think we should do #2. It works for themes (Appearance => Themes).

And actually it's a duplicate of #1167458: New users do not know to click on 'Modules' to extend their site. Sorry about that.

Would you have guessed?

No, actually, because I find "People" to be a horribly confusing substitute for "Users". Not all users are people and not all people are users of a site. They aren't interchangeable and I thought it was a very strange move. I'd hate to see the same thing happen with "Modules".