[development] Categorizing modules-demonstrating the value of the Drupal platform

[Kieran Lal]

Hi, software platforms like Drupal are often evaluated by the  
additional components they have.  Today Drupal's contributed modules  
are plentiful but the value of the modules is hard to discover  
because the modules are hard to understand.   This can be fixed in 3  
ways.  First, we need to categorize modules so that they can be  
quickly discovered.  Second, we need to evaluate modules to rate  
their quality.  Third, we need to make it easier to understand  
contributed modules.

CivicSpace Labs with a lot of personal contributions from Nedjo and  
Dries have extended the project module to allow modules to be  
categorized.   This new categorization can be seen on the Drupal.org  
beta site: http://scratch.drupal.org/project/Modules

We are looking for volunteers to help us discover what the logical  
categories for modules on the Drupal platform is.  We are starting  
with the developer community who know the modules best.  In the long  
run we are likely to conduct a card sort usability experiment to  
confirm that modules are well categorized for web site developers,  
and Drupal administrators.  We know from recent surveys that  
installing new modules is one of the most common tasks and therefore  
represents one of the biggest usability improvements for Drupal.  We  
are looking for volunteers to wade through the modules and attempt a  
first pass at categorization.

There are 4 groups of modules we could evaluate with the total  
modules increasing in each category.  The larger the group to  
categorize the more work.
1) Most downloaded modules about 40- http://drupal.org/node/46109
2) Modules with administration help documentation. http://drupal.org/ 
handbook/modules -about 80
3) Modules with project pages http://drupal.org/project/Modules-  
about 200? <-has the advantage of allowing us to categorize all the  
project modules
4) Modules checked into the CVS contributions directory http:// 
cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/drupal/contributions/modules/- Several hundred?

The goal is to get this categorization done for the upcoming  
Drupal.org upgrade.  I'll moderate this thread to coordinate  
volunteers and help to come up with some top level categories.

Please suggest some top level categories for module project pages.

Cheers,
Kieran


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