Come together with the global Drupal community in Rotterdam, 28 Sept – 1 Oct 2026. Sessions, contribution, connection, and Early Bird savings until 8 June.I don't know if this should go against project or against the website. Feel free to move it.
I have been going through the modules by name page pulling out links to modules related to forums and also to social networking in general. The first is for use in my advanced forum project and the second is for an article. I planned on repeating the excercise for other site types in the future for other articles. The articles would be sort of scaled down site recipes to tell people what modules they want to look at for various types of sites. I got about halfway through the B's on this rather long list of modules and had an idea.
What if we add another vocabulary for "site type"? By placing modules into site type categories, a person could select the sort of site they are making and get a list of modules that they should take a look at. It wouldn't be a perfect recipe as some of the "ingredients" would be duplicates of other ingredients (ie: nodeprofile & bio), but it would give people a starting point.
Some suggested site types:
Brochure
Business
Social networking
Forum
Newspaper
Media-centric
Blog
Family
Map-centric
What do you think?
Michelle
Comments
Comment #1
dwwInteresting idea. Mostly I like it. Definitely specific to d.o, not project*.
My main concern is that a lot of modules qualify for many kinds of sites. This has a few implications:
A) It might get ugly and hard to read on the project nodes if many of these terms apply. It'll also be important to keep these visually distinct from the existing module category terms. I bet we'll need some bluebeach themeing effort for this, so a mock-up would be a nice start. See http://groups.drupal.org/node/6186
B) It won't always be clear which kinds of sites a certain module is "good" for, and different people might have different ideas. E.g. what kinds of sites would you say the signup.module is good for? Not "Brochure", maybe not "blog", but i could imagine potential uses for pretty much all the others. Where do you draw the line?
My other concern is the overlap between these "site types" and "project types":
- "media-centric" vs. "media": http://drupal.org/project/Modules/category/67
- "Map-centric" vs. "location": http://drupal.org/project/Modules/category/65
- "buisness" vs. "Commerce / advertising" http://drupal.org/project/Modules/category/55 and/or "e-Commerce" http://drupal.org/project/Modules/category/104
...
Comment #2
michelleA) Hmm... I'd forgotten that the terms would show on the project node. You're right that needs some thought. I'll check out that link when I'm done writing this.
B) Some modules, like CCK and views, would apply to all types and that's ok. That's why this differs from the existing category vocabulary. The focus isn't on categorizing so much as building lists. So every site type would suggest more general modules like CCK and views as well as the set modules that are more specific to that site type.
B.2) The difference between "media-centric" and "media" is the media category has only media modules. media-centric would have, as above, CCK and views and other non media items as well.
The idea is that someone comes to Drupal and asks what they need to build MySpace (which I've seen more than once) and they are directed to the social networking list for all the modules they should investigate. There is still some work; it's not an install profile. They'll need to decide between, say, nodeprofile and bio. But it's a smaller list to start with than being faced with the 1000(?) modules on the modules by name page. And it's a self updating list by virtue of tags on the projects which is a lot easier to maintain than me going through and making a list which will be obsolete in days as the onslaught of new modules continues. ;)
Michelle
Comment #3
christefano commentedMany new modules are now being entered into every "Type of sites" category when they're simply "utility modules" that aren't specific to any type of site. This is a problem that needs to be figured out soon or the category system will be filled with useless information. I think the form should have checkboxes (instead of a multiselect list) and use JavaScript to disable them when the "Any" checkbox is checked.
update: After catching up on the development list, I found that this has been discussed there and on groups.drupal.org/node/16732, as well.
Comment #4
gerhard killesreiter commentedis this still relevant after the redesign?
Comment #5
michelleI think it would still be useful, at least until we get something that allows us to easily tag multiple modules into packages. This is sort of a poor man's version of that. It would let you use tagging to get a list of modules you need that you would then download individually.
Michelle
Comment #6
dave reidComment #7
tvn commentedClosing old issues. Please re-open if needed.