If you’ve been following along you’d be aware that one of the nuts we’re currently trying to crack is the modules section of the drupal.org website – how can we make modules more findable?
In the interest of gathering more information to help make a good decision, i’ve put together another little cardsorting exercise. If you have a spare 15mins or so, I’d love if you could take a look at it!
You can find it here: http://disambiguity.optimalsort.com/drupalmodules/
If you have any comments/questions/feedback to the contents of the cardsort or the process, feel free to post them here.
The cardsort is set to close on Friday 21 November.
Thank you!
Card sorting the current categories doesn’t seem to make much sense. I can’t see any connections with these categories. Would sorting some sub set of modules be more useful?
hi Boris
they’re not actually the current categories, they are some alternate (I think improved) categories, but we are keen to reduce the number of categories so the idea of this card sort is to see if there are any logical meta-categories… make sense?
I’d much rather sort some modules, but I wasn’t able to come up with a way to do that given that there are *so* many modules (how would you choose a sub-set? I couldn’t come up with a logical approach, although I guess we could sort the first few dozen most used modules?).
The other problem is that evaluating *what* a module actually does is tricky – you certainly can’t do it from the title only in many cases (even some of the most important modules, like, say CCK), and even with all of the information supplied with a module it can still be difficult.
So, yes, it’s not a perfect approach and theoretically sorting modules would make much more sense. I don’t know how useful this exercise will prove to be – we’re just looking for patterns and seeing if anything interesting emerges.
thanks for your feedback :)
On first sight, I wanted to agree with Boris, but then went ahead to see whether this really cannot be done.
Now I think it can be done. It is *very* challenging. You should have some neat top-level vocabulary names when you’re done.
Some items are missing though – f.e. generic ones like “Theming”, “Administration”, “Help”, “Community”, “Blog”, as well as some of the other terms that were mentioned in the other blog post comments.
I think just two or three, otherwise a lot of modules and categories belong in more than one container:
Site-building foundations
Adding site features
Additional tools
To me a better idea is just using a well-structured taxonomy (not freetagging, but perhaps voting/rating on ideas for new terms) and allowing modules to be tagged with as many terms as applicable.
Then have a specific “looking for modules” forum where visitors can come, describe their use case and get advice as to what *terms* apply as well as specific module tips.
This could of course supplement the “this belongs in only one place” idea for more structured navigation, I jus think that’s less useful for a domain where the edges aren’t clear.