[development] Re: [infrastructure] [task] Spreadsheet of Drupal 4.6 modules and their terms in categories

[Chris Cook]

On 2/20/06, Robert Castelo <robert.castelo at cortextcommunications.com> wrote:
> Once you're in one of the category pages there is no info displayed
> showing which category you're looking at.

In fact, the active category is visible in the collapsible category
list which is collapsed by default. The category list isn't very
noticeable or practical on that page though. Perhaps an option to go
back to the category selection page or a select list would be better?

> Would be useful to be able to see just a list of items in each
> category, rather than running through the teasers and links for each
> one. In most cases the module titles are self explanatory, a list would
> allow you to go straight to the module you want.

Alternatively, there have been discussions around determining the
quality or stability of modules. It is probably a silly suggestion but
would there be value in listing the number of bugs for each module? I
dislike the idea of "ratings" because in practice ratings are never
accurate. You can browse http://addons.mozilla.org/ to confirm that.
Listing the number of bugs for each module though (not support
requests but only active bugs) would at least give the maintainer some
added incentive to maintain their issue list as well as their project.

That probably isn't a desirable solution for either users or
contributors but perhaps in the long term we could display some kind
of "module health" metric based on project age, active bugs, perhaps
number of support requests,  time since last commit (or more advanced
activity monitoring), and _maybe_ user rating. Done right that could
be really nice. Doing it right seems difficult though.

Cheers,
Chris