Lately, I've been finding myself playing around more and more with Drupal's capabilities, advocating its simplicity and power to friends, and generally having a good time... And as this happens, I find myself skimming the Downloads/Modules page more and more often.
And I keep running into the same problems:
1) There's no way to sort modules by activity/recency
-- often, a great sounding module is out of date (with or without a better working CVS version not referred to in the description), or hidden so far down the page alphabetically (or even overlapping in namespace with out of date modules) that finding or referring it to others causes endless headaches. This has a (rough) solution: http://drupal.org/taxonomy/term/14/0 (term listing of all modules, which does* do reverse date order... But, it's not subdivided in a nice way by compatible drupal version, nor does it reference modules in the listings themselves according to the module version)
Still, especially for folks new to Drupal, any efforts to steer us towards the "right-most-of-the-time" solution, or perhaps just the "least-custom/performance damaging" solution the first* time, rather than needing to try every possible solution out themselves, is a GOOD THING.
2) There's no (easy) way to gauge the popularity of the module
(number of times downloaded, qualitative vote by community members)
--This is, as far as I know, something that could just be "switched on" today - at least in terms of the number of times a given module node was viewed - and it shouldn't be too hard to add the number of downloads to each listing.
3) There's no way to gauge the compatibility/stability of the module
(special "not extremely broken" seal of approval from a core developer, qualitative vote by community members, other??)
--By rating/tracking stability along with popularity, it might be easier for interested potential developers (or, in some alternate reality, extremely bored core developers) to see which modules "need the most help" - popular but unstable/incomplete modules... Or, as we move towards 4.7, modules that may be extremely popular in 4.6, but simply haven't been moved to the new architecture
4) There's no way (outside of a diligently written description) to associate modules with their dependencies
--This would be cool not only as a way to organize/identify the total module-weight of a given module, but also it could work "in reverse": as a way to see all the examples of modules that, say, use flexinode, or the voting API, or Views, etc.
5) There's no guarantee that a publicly posted module is associated with an actual maintainer/creator, or that the creator can actually support the full functionality of their module
--Not to complain too specifically about the banner.module, but the author himself admits that he cannot test flash banner functionality, as he does not have flash! Thus, we're left with a module with "flash banner content type" support, that doesn't work and can't be fixed! Are there other examples of abandonware (or brokenware) that does not properly reflect its status as such? Possibly...
6) For modules that have some of the issues above, there's no really good way to post bounties for issue resolution.
--This may have ugly "feelies" for the drupal.org site itself, but right now, the best places to post bounties are in the general forums, or in the bug/feature requests of the individual modules... Which are most read by people who are having (but cannot solve) the problem, and the module maintainer (if they are still active). There can/should be some easy means to show that people are interested in donating something other than coding hours to a project/module. As much as Drupal tends to flow with the old saw that "open source developers scratch their own itch" - the biggest itch of all is simply to be paid for open source development. I'm not saying there are a ton of folks out there with the right skills out of the gate who would* become involved with Drupal for money alone... But, it's an additional incentive, and perhaps an added push to start down the road to Drupal love.
I say this primarily as an interested and so far Drupal-loving user, but having a more in-depth rating system for modules (and themes/engines/translations?) might* also help developers to identify what people are using already, and hopefully avoid at least some of the conceptual/functional forking that seems to be going on, and consolidate development behind a flagship (almost wrote core there) module or two. And, regardless of what anyone says, knowing where your community is taking your project IS an important piece of information to track, especially during the hyper-growth Drupal is experiencing where it literally seems to be pushing out in every conceivable direction.
This is already way* too long and winding, but I'm basically looking for the following (poor example, with apologies to the creator of Disk Node):
Dork Node
DorkNode adds a new nodetype called DorkNode. The main perpose for this node is to serve as a module. Each dorknode links to a single yumgun stored within the file storage. These files are already in this directory. Yumgun management tools are provided with the dorknode. It will allow you to upload a local file or a file already stored on an other webserver.
Downloads of the files are counted.
DDEV is the official local development tool of Drupal. And like Drupal, DDEV depends on the support of the open source community.
