[documentation] Tag clouds and documentation

[Alan Palazzolo]

My two cents on this.  I would propose two structures in unison.

1) Formal tagging hierarchal structure, specific categories
2) Free tagging

This allows for both ways of finding information.  It creates a
structure that is necessary for such a large amount of information while
also giving opportunity for organic growth.

-- 
Alan
http://alanpalazzolo.com/



On 9/8/08 1:23 PM, Addison Berry wrote:
> Yep, I agree that the way the docs are organized/categorized/found  
> needs to change in the redesign. I'd love a flexible way for people to  
> get to the docs they need in different ways. This is a major thing  
> that I want us to work with Mark Boulton Design (MBD) on. I am  
> gathering together a list of features/dream requests with regards to  
> docs and hope to post a mail to this list by the end of the week so we  
> can be a bit organized about brainstorming, prioritizing and giving  
> feedback to MBD. I'm so frickin excited we have not just design, but  
> actual IA and UX work going into the redesign.
> 
> Faceted search is awesome stuff as well and I dare say that is  
> something that the redesign search team will be looking at. Their  
> first hurdle is to figure out how to have robust search across  
> multiple drupal.org sites and I have no idea where something like  
> faceted search is on their radar. Would be awesome if it makes it into  
> the redesign, but I'll leave that to those experts. Doesn't hurt to  
> say that docs team thinks it would be neat-o-keen, though. :-)
> 
> - Addi
> 
> On Sep 8, 2008, at 1:58 PM, Lee Hunter wrote:
> 
>> 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.
>> --
>> Pending work: http://drupal.org/project/issues/documentation/
>> List archives: http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/documentation/
> 
> --
> Pending work: http://drupal.org/project/issues/documentation/
> List archives: http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/documentation/