[documentation] Tag clouds and documentation

[Addison Berry]

Yep, I agree that the way the docs are organized/categorized/found  
needs to change in the redesign. I'd love a flexible way for people to  
get to the docs they need in different ways. This is a major thing  
that I want us to work with Mark Boulton Design (MBD) on. I am  
gathering together a list of features/dream requests with regards to  
docs and hope to post a mail to this list by the end of the week so we  
can be a bit organized about brainstorming, prioritizing and giving  
feedback to MBD. I'm so frickin excited we have not just design, but  
actual IA and UX work going into the redesign.

Faceted search is awesome stuff as well and I dare say that is  
something that the redesign search team will be looking at. Their  
first hurdle is to figure out how to have robust search across  
multiple drupal.org sites and I have no idea where something like  
faceted search is on their radar. Would be awesome if it makes it into  
the redesign, but I'll leave that to those experts. Doesn't hurt to  
say that docs team thinks it would be neat-o-keen, though. :-)

- Addi

On Sep 8, 2008, at 1:58 PM, Lee Hunter wrote:

> I don't think there's any way it could be worse than the utterly
> inscrutable architecture we have now.
>
> :)
>
> Using the Cake example, one click gets you all the database articles.
> On the current Drupal.org you would probably have to click *hundreds*
> of times (quite literally) before you rounded up everything on
> databases (and personally I'd get lost and give up long before I got
> there).
>
> The Cake example, does show one of the limitations in that you might
> get an overwhelming number of results, however this is still
> preferable to not even knowing where to start.
>
> To solve the issue of too many results, one approach I really like is
> the guided search or faceted search, which is used on quite a few
> large and complex sites. In fact, there's a module here:
>
> http://drupal.org/project/faceted_search
>
> Faceted search has several advantages, one of which is that you can
> see at a glance how your search could be broadened or narrowed by
> choosing from a list of options. Using the "database" example, there
> might well be too many results to be useful, but the faceted search
> would allow me to easily narrow it down by clicking on the "facets" or
> related tags (and I'd also see how many articles can be found in each
> related tag).
>
> Re. the redesign project, that's one reason I'm raising this issue
> again now, because I think it would be just tragic if the current
> non-architecture gets baked into the redesign. To my mind, the total
> lack of navigability in the documentation is by far the most pressing
> problem with Drupal.org.
>
> A while back, I'd actually proposed an alternative architecture for
> the documentation (http://drupal.org/node/199388) but I'm now thinking
> that some kind of organic tagging scheme would work better for this
> kind of site.
>
> Lee Hunter
> Technical Editor
>
>
> On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 1:37 PM, Steven Peck <sepeck at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Other than saying 'tags will help' do you have a better hierarchy  
>> suggestion?
>>
>> My experience with tags in general on many other sites has been that
>> they also pollute search results into rabbit warrens of unrelated
>> pages.  I am not against tags, just not seeing them as a magic bullet
>> currently.  I am loathe to just 'tack things on' while we have a
>> redesign project starting up.
> --
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