Content Specific Modules for Small Constituencies, Are they Kosher?
I'm thinking of creating a very simple module. All it would do is install a particular vocabulary on your site which has about 50 terms (I'll give the specific example further below). So I went to the modules directory and looked through the taxonomy category... looked at all 228 modules, and didn't find one which installed terms from a specific knowledge realm. I expected there to be some taxonomies from the realms of biology or other sciences; nothing. Thinking outside of "taxonomy" I remembered the weather module, which has 500K of data listing standard weather stations worldwide. And then the location module which has about 2mb of specific data on places. Now to my example... Jews study portions of the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) on a set calendar. The Torah is broken into 54 set portions; each of those portions has a name. It's traditional for clergy and lay leaders to give sermons or teachings related to the current portion of the week. For sites that post material relevant to the Torah portion, being able to easily install such a vocabulary populated with all the terms would be a nice convenience for them. My rough estimate is that there are about 50 synagogues currently using Drupal and probably another 150 Jewish organizations. The number is growing quickly, yet this is still a small number. So my question is... does the Drupal modules repository welcome such a targeted module with a small potential user-group with content that is specific and contains no generalizable functionality? My assumption had "yes." But seeing that others haven't created similar modules for specific vocabularies... makes me wonder. What say you?
Shai
On 2009-11-18, at 11:11 PM, Shai Gluskin wrote:
I'm thinking of creating a very simple module. All it would do is install a particular vocabulary on your site which has about 50 terms (I'll give the specific example further below).
It strikes me that this would be much better suited as an install profile which would set this up, along with other common modules and data used by synagogues. It might be worth reaching out to them, finding some other common features which you need for your site, and starting from there instead. Or, if taxonomy import is all you need, see about a generic taxonomy import / export solution, and providing a dataset for that somewhere. --Andrew
On Wednesday 18 November 2009 10:24:59 pm Andrew Berry wrote:
On 2009-11-18, at 11:11 PM, Shai Gluskin wrote:
I'm thinking of creating a very simple module. All it would do is install a particular vocabulary on your site which has about 50 terms (I'll give the specific example further below).
It strikes me that this would be much better suited as an install profile which would set this up, along with other common modules and data used by synagogues. It might be worth reaching out to them, finding some other common features which you need for your site, and starting from there instead.
Or, if taxonomy import is all you need, see about a generic taxonomy import / export solution, and providing a dataset for that somewhere.
--Andrew
I think the last answer here is key. Modules that provide *functionality* that is useful only to a small subset of users are fine. There's a LOT of those around. :-) However, modules that exist only as a glorified data dump really should not, IMO, be modules to begin with. They should be handled in some more elegant data-dump-centric way. If such a way doesn't exist, that sounds like a perfectly good excuse to build one. -- Larry Garfield larry@garfieldtech.com
Larry wrote, "If such a way doesn't exist, that sounds like a perfectly good excuse to build one." I was thinking along those same lines... Like a site where people could contribute and collaborate on open-source taxonomies, with widgets built in like, "export to Drupal", "export to Plone", "export to CSV". And it would be cool if the export to Drupal choice created a zip with a fully formed, dynamically generated module. Installing a module is much less threatening to people than running a code snippet throgh Devel's drupal_execute utility. And with D7 all the more so. Anybody know of an open source taxonomy repository kind of site. Shai On Nov 18, 2009, at 11:53 PM, Larry Garfield <larry@garfieldtech.com> wrote:
If such a way doesn't exist, that sounds like a perfectly good excuse to build one.
Shai, have you seen http://drupal.org/project/taxonomy_xml? I haven't used it myself yet, but the module description says that it "makes it possible to import and export vocabularies and taxonomy terms via XML, CSV, RDF and other formats". Sounds like the module you need. On Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:21:00 -0500, Shai Gluskin wrote: Larry wrote, "If such a way doesn't exist, that sounds like a perfectly good excuse to build one." I was thinking along those same lines... Like a site where people could contribute and collaborate on open-source taxonomies, with widgets built in like, "export to Drupal", "export to Plone", "export to CSV". And it would be cool if the export to Drupal choice created a zip with a fully formed, dynamically generated module. Installing a module is much less threatening to people than running a code snippet throgh Devel's drupal_execute utility. And with D7 all the more so. Anybody know of an open source taxonomy repository kind of site. Shai On Nov 18, 2009, at 11:53 PM, Larry Garfield wrote: If such a way doesn't exist, that sounds like a perfectly good excuse to build one. Links: ------ [1] mailto:larry@garfieldtech.com
Shai Gluskin wrote:
All it would do is install a particular vocabulary
The Torah is broken into 54 set portions
Perhaps the best thing to do is to look at the Taxonomy Import/Export module and offer it as a an add-on set already to go. Perhaps they would accept such a pre-made vocabulary to be bundled with the module. Nancy E. Wichmann, PMP (781) 697-6344 Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. -- Dr. Martin L. King, Jr.
A distribution profile? Or better yet, to be installed as a feature. Victor Kane On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 9:32 AM, Nancy Wichmann <nan_wich@bellsouth.net>wrote:
Shai Gluskin wrote:
All it would do is install a particular vocabulary
The Torah is broken into 54 set portions
Perhaps the best thing to do is to look at the Taxonomy Import/Export module and offer it as a an add-on set already to go. Perhaps they would accept such a pre-made vocabulary to be bundled with the module.
Nancy E. Wichmann, PMP
(781) 697-6344
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. -- Dr. Martin L. King, Jr.
participants (6)
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Andrew Berry -
info＠marcvangend.nl -
Larry Garfield -
Nancy Wichmann -
Shai Gluskin -
Victor Kane