Downloads - SourceForge.net

so, a big part of our redesign challenge is to make modules easy to find and evaluate. A few people suggested to me that SourceForge was a good site to look at for inspiration for Drupals module section.

I'd be interested to hear what you like/dislike about the sourceforge 'search results' page (if anything) and what we might do that is similar or different for Drupal?

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Comments

gregglesworth says:

Interesting. I think you should ask those people what they like about sourceforge. I really don't like their interface.
Posted 14 months ago. ( permalink )

changwuf31 says:

Agree with greggles, let's look somewhere else.
Posted 14 months ago. ( permalink )

cooltennisman says:

wow that's...so ugly
Posted 14 months ago. ( permalink )

_leisa says:

ok. it's definitely ugly. two things I'd suggest though:

a) are there bits of information that we can take from this page and use on our modules search/browse results page? (to help people choose one module or another? are things like no. of downloads or some kind of activity ranking useful?

b) where else shall we look? suggestions please! :)
Posted 14 months ago. ( permalink )

bertboerland says:

re: b) i like the "fred" (multi criteria evaluation) of drupalmodules.com. for example: drupalmodules.com/module/simplenews?#reviews
Posted 14 months ago. ( permalink )

demeester_roel says:

I agree with b).. A lot of what's been happening there should really be re-used.

Only the design is a bit old-fashioned, but it could be easily be merged inside the new d.o design

What most people interests when downloading modules.
1. Activity. (is this module abonded, or still highly active)
2. Popularity (to compare similar modules, this could be a good discriminator). Popularity can be either in #downloads, or in #installed (update_status module has this info)
3. Quality: Has this module been reviewed. Has this module been checked by the Coder module (good syntax). Does it pass (many?) SImpletests.
Posted 14 months ago. ( permalink )

dipen_ says:

I have been saying that on twitter and will repeat here too that we need some kind of rating turned on modules, I've had lot of problems using something which was a cold turkey, not updated, not reviewed by community. Also I suggest only quantitative rating on the project page to keep it sane.

I agree with demeester_roel on all 3 points, more strongly on 1 and 2
project page should have some info on when was it last updated, number of downloads like firefox add on site has it and what would be really advanced and cool would be a case studies tab, where whenever it is tagged in a particular fashion somewhere on drupal.org it appears there. Like d.o has lots of case studies and there could be extra vocabulary like modules used and hance this mashup.
Posted 14 months ago. ( permalink )

alanjosephburke says:

A quality score for the module is much more important than subjective ratings by end users, but those ratings could help too.

In terms of qualitative measures, some things I look for in a module to determine it's worth.

In order of importance.

1. Reputation of the module developer.
I've been around long enough to know that something developed by merlinofchaos will be better that something developed by alanburke.
How is that reputation earned?
Some factors
How long has the developer been around?
Do they contribute to core?
How many modules have they got?
Do their modules get updated for each version of Drupal?
Are they active on mailing lists?
Do their blog postings make sense :-).

I'm not sure how we could 'measure' all this though.

Many times, reputation is enough for me.

2. Activity.
Are there plenty of commits to CVS?
Does it have multiple maintainers? - this is a biggie. A project with multiple maintainers is much more likely to be active in the long term.

3. Code quality.
Does it pass Coder review?
Does it list other modules as dependencies?
Do other modules rely on it as a dependency?

4. Popularity.
Is the module in active use on other sites?
Do I read lots of blog post about it?
Is the issue queue active?

In general - all I'm trying to gauge is that the project is "healthy", "living" and "growing". If I think it is, I'll use it.

It was the same question I had when I evaluated Drupal in the first place. It's nice to be right sometimes :-)
Posted 14 months ago. ( permalink )

bertboerland says:

@roel-de-master

2. Popularity (to compare similar modules, this could be a good discriminator). Popularity can be either in #downloads, or in #installed (update_status module has this info)

dividing # of downloadmaximum number of downloads in that taxonomy itmes is a good way of normalizing data

eg: image modules:
module a 4 downloads
module b 5 downloads
module c 16 downloads

score a 25%
score b 31%
score c 100%
Posted 14 months ago. ( permalink )

robertDouglass says:

oooh, Sourceforge is a horrible example. I never want to have to click through 7 screens to get to the download. No thank you.
Posted 14 months ago. ( permalink )

gregglesworth says:

"we need some kind of rating turned on modules"

No. Nor do we need # of downloads as a metric (or at least not an important one). These are easily gamed and people will abuse them!

Much better is something like Leisa mentions in flickr.com/photos/_leisa/2837345676/in/photos tream/ about using a karma system which can be paid forward (though even that can and would be gamed).

We have to be really careful to limit the amount of trickery that people can play with these because people _will_ try to skew the numbers. I have already seen shady actions taken with download numbers ever since started calculating their use. As soon as another metric becomes important people will try to fake it as well.
Posted 14 months ago. ( permalink )

catch|drupal says:

I'd like to see test failures, and maybe coder reports on modules, as well as prominent metrics about issue queue activity and commits. While these might be more or less gamed by some, having multiple different metrics would make it a full time job to game all of them.

The idea of having some kind of hard link to the showcases is good too.
Posted 14 months ago. ( permalink )

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Downloads - SourceForge.net

Comments

gregglesworth says:

changwuf31 says:

cooltennisman says:

_leisa says:

bertboerland says:

demeester_roel says:

dipen_ says:

alanjosephburke says:

bertboerland says:

robertDouglass says:

gregglesworth says:

catch|drupal says:

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