[documentation] Tag clouds and documentation

[Tony Narlock]

Lee Hunter wrote:
> Sorry, you're quite right, the cloud is from his sites..
>
> However, it doesn't change the point of my message.  The organization
> of the documentation is seriously fractured and a tag cloud of
> drupal.org searches (whatever that might be) would help a lot to bring
> things together.
>
> Lee Hunter
> Technical Editor
>
> On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 12:24 PM, Steven Peck <sepeck at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> His analysis is NOT of drupal.org search terms, but of his own personal sites.
>>
>> On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 6:14 AM, Lee Hunter <lee.hunter at hum.com> wrote:
>>     
>>> John Forsythe of Blamcast has recently blogged this nice tag cloud
>>> showing the top search terms on Drupal.org for the past month
>>>
>>> http://blamcast.net/articles/top-drupal-search-terms
>>> http://blamcast.net/files/drupal-search-terms-cloud.html
>>>
>>> Wouldn't it be great if the documentation page had a similar tag cloud
>>> and each of those terms was a link to ALL the related documentation
>>> for that term? In other words, if you clicked "image" you'd see a page
>>> that has links to every piece of image-related documentation,
>>> regardless of whether it happened to be filed (i.e. hidden) under
>>> module documentation, how-to, theming, FAQ, video, developer
>>> documentation etc.
>>>
>>> No more wild goose chases checking whether there's something on images
>>> in the how-tos, or the FAQs, or the videos, or the troubleshooting etc
>>> etc etc.
>>>
>>> To me, that would be heaven.
>>>
>>> Lee Hunter
>>> Technical Editor
>>> --
>>> Pending work: http://drupal.org/project/issues/documentation/
>>> List archives: http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/documentation/
>>>
>>>       
>> --
>> Pending work: http://drupal.org/project/issues/documentation/
>> List archives: http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/documentation/
>>
>>     
> --
> Pending work: http://drupal.org/project/issues/documentation/
> List archives: http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/documentation/
>   
Ideas are harmless. :)

If there is something that we can do to help people get the
documentation they want quicker, by all means.

When designing sites, we have things like the "3 click rule". The
handbook gives us a hierarchy, with stuff like tags, they can click on
"handbook" and see a tag cloud on the top. It we can do it to make it
look professional, it doesn't need to be big, just to give a quick link
to the most common stuff.

See an example here: http://bakery.cakephp.org/

If you take some time to think about what people who are looking for
info on... Sometimes they may need a tag to "spark" a particular search
word they may other wise not be thinking of. There are cases where you
don't want tags+tag clouds, and cases where you do -- this may be a case
where it's advantageous.

Hope this helps
Tony