[documentation] Tag clouds and documentation

[Lee Hunter]

I don't think there's any way it could be worse than the utterly
inscrutable architecture we have now.

:)

Using the Cake example, one click gets you all the database articles.
On the current Drupal.org you would probably have to click *hundreds*
of times (quite literally) before you rounded up everything on
databases (and personally I'd get lost and give up long before I got
there).

The Cake example, does show one of the limitations in that you might
get an overwhelming number of results, however this is still
preferable to not even knowing where to start.

To solve the issue of too many results, one approach I really like is
the guided search or faceted search, which is used on quite a few
large and complex sites. In fact, there's a module here:

http://drupal.org/project/faceted_search

Faceted search has several advantages, one of which is that you can
see at a glance how your search could be broadened or narrowed by
choosing from a list of options. Using the "database" example, there
might well be too many results to be useful, but the faceted search
would allow me to easily narrow it down by clicking on the "facets" or
related tags (and I'd also see how many articles can be found in each
related tag).

Re. the redesign project, that's one reason I'm raising this issue
again now, because I think it would be just tragic if the current
non-architecture gets baked into the redesign. To my mind, the total
lack of navigability in the documentation is by far the most pressing
problem with Drupal.org.

A while back, I'd actually proposed an alternative architecture for
the documentation (http://drupal.org/node/199388) but I'm now thinking
that some kind of organic tagging scheme would work better for this
kind of site.

Lee Hunter
Technical Editor


On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 1:37 PM, Steven Peck <sepeck at gmail.com> wrote:
> Other than saying 'tags will help' do you have a better hierarchy suggestion?
>
> My experience with tags in general on many other sites has been that
> they also pollute search results into rabbit warrens of unrelated
> pages.  I am not against tags, just not seeing them as a magic bullet
> currently.  I am loathe to just 'tack things on' while we have a
> redesign project starting up.