[support] navigating through Drupal modules

[Larry Garfield]

I'll say again, any module presentation mechanism has to be able to scale from 
5000 modules (we'll be there soon) to 10,000 modules (so we don't have to 
redesign it again in 2 months.)

There has already been an immense amount of work put into designing a revamped 
project management system for drupal.org, including the hiring of an 
internationally acclaimed designer, Mark Boulton.  (Who has since become a 
Drupal fan, because we're just that cool.)  An upgrade to the site is in 
progress.  See the group below for more.

http://groups.drupal.org/drupalorg-redesign-plan-drupal-association

On Thursday 07 May 2009 8:11:33 am Cosmo wrote:
> This is an amazing presentation of modules.
>
> Here's a few suggestions if you don't mind.
>
> 1) I think one of the right nav boxes should contain the entire list of
> modules because one feature you offer is (if I could quickly narrow the
> group to a select list of modules) the dependencies.
>
> 2) I think you can tell a great deal about a module based on it's number of
> downloads, latest revision date, number of issues posted about the module,
> last date of that issue and whether (or when) the last issue was closed.
>
> Your presentation method would take module discovery to a new level.
>
> The only other thing I would ask is for someone to offer a place where
> module users (like myself) could go to, relative to a specific module, and
> post how the module was used by me. What I achieved and how I did it. It
> would create be a self documenting project area of sorts.
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: support-bounces at drupal.org [mailto:support-bounces at drupal.org]On
> Behalf Of Annet de Boer
> Sent: Thursday, May 07, 2009 1:16 AM
> To: support at drupal.org
> Subject: Re: [support] navigating through Drupal modules
>
>
> Well actually I found the test site you made very usefull at first
> sight! If there are too many modules to keep it on one page, there's a
> possibility to make your visitors do a first selection to narrow down
> the number of results, right? It's not an "all or nothing" case here.
> I like the fact that you can see in just one line what the main target
> of the module is. And the "Most popular" and "Most downloaded" tags
> (which are used in most websites) are a bit obscene since they only make
> the most popular more popular.. I was actually waiting to find a site
> which would handle the information more like you did in your testsite.
> So, don't let them stop ya ;)
>
> Regards,
> Annet
>
> John Callahan schreef:
> > Thanks Larry.  Had a feeling that was the case.  I've seen some Exhibit
> > based sites perform OK with 800 - 1000 items and hoped that would fit
> > here.  4500+ and growing is definitely out of range.
> > I do like the Apache Solr faceted search much better than when d.o was
> > at D5.  More metadata about projects would help.  Possibly less
> > information returned per project to make it easier to scan.  Searching
> > through all of the modules and finding the ones you need is a problem
> > that I hope gets easier, especially for those new to Drupal.  I'm
> > looking forward to the new design and trying it out.
> > - John
> >
> > Larry Garfield wrote:
> >> No we can't.  There are over 4500 modules.  A page listing all modules
> >> and providing anything even resembling useful data would be several
> >> megabytes in size just to view, to say nothing of the processing
> >> costs.  We used to have pages like that.  They didn't scale. :-)
> >>
> >> The in-progress site redesign includes much more metadata on projects
> >> and ways to search projects, in addition to the new solr faceted
> >> search that was added recently.  Searching large data sets is not an
> >> easy problem.  But simply dumping the entire dataset to the page is
> >> not a solution at 4500 modules, and it certainly won't be a solution
> >> as the number of modules continues to rise.

-- 
Larry Garfield
larry at garfieldtech.com