[development] Encouraging Collaboration

[Nedjo Rogers]

>> 1. Download page: we are working on improving the download page.
>
> great is there a discussion about this somewhere?

A first step patch was applied to the Project module to enable full 
categorization of projects (e.g., with multiple vocabularies), see 
http://drupal.org/node/32121.

An issue and draft patch for the next steps - sorting by date and category 
as well as alphabetically - is at:

http://drupal.org/node/33803

I've been working this week on a revised patch and should have it posted 
next week.  Comments meantime would be welcome.

And Kieran at CivicSpace Labs is organizing a 'card sort' approach to 
deciding how to classify existing modules and themes.

There is also a proposal to implement (opt in) XML-RPC calls between Drupal 
installs and drupal.org, see issue at http://drupal.org/node/34108.  I'm 
beginning work on this issue--other ideas and contributions very welcome. 
>From that issue:

Dries:  "rather than using explicit rating where users have to submit a 
score by hand, I'd prefer to use automatic ratings. I envision some XML-RPC 
function that posts a list of one's modules to Drupal.org. Drupal.org uses 
that to update/compile ratings. A key advantage is that: (i) it needs no 
manual rating/interaction (no interface cruft) (ii) easy to make it temporal 
so that the ratings automatically adapt over time (iii) better matches the 
reality."

...

We could also extend this to enable drupal installs to query drupal.org for 
newer versions of installed modules, recent bugfixes, newly released 
modules, etc., thus providing significant benefits to the installed base.