[documentation] Tag clouds and documentation

[Patrick Teglia]

I, for one, am hoping that faceted_search shows up in the redesign.

I have worked with it, and would say that it is, by far, the best way I have
seen to search through copious amount of content.  I am uncertain how it
performs however, and I am sure that will be a concern.

Also, can not Robert Douglass' Apache Solr integration work with
faceted_search, giving a fairly powerful overall search?

Another thing to keep in mind is that faceted_search works WITH taxonomy
terms, so a mix of being able to free-tag something, and use a faceted
search to retrieve it could be pretty useful.

Thanks,

Patrick Teglia
CrashTest_

On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 12:47 PM, Alan Palazzolo <me at alanpalazzolo.com>wrote:

> My two cents on this.  I would propose two structures in unison.
>
> 1) Formal tagging hierarchal structure, specific categories
> 2) Free tagging
>
> This allows for both ways of finding information.  It creates a
> structure that is necessary for such a large amount of information while
> also giving opportunity for organic growth.
>
> --
> Alan
> http://alanpalazzolo.com/
>
>
>
> On 9/8/08 1:23 PM, Addison Berry wrote:
> > 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.
> >> --
> >> 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/
>
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