Romku is an online library, community-driven, information portal software. It aims to reference all existing software, applications, suites, games, utilities, scripts, libraries, frameworks, and tools (currently over 100,000).
Each profile, created by members, provides all the information users need to decide which software to use, integrate, download, buy, contribute to, or simply play with:
- Short description/abstract of what the software is and does
- Categories in which the software belongs
- User Ratings
- Screenshots of the application in action
- Similar software
- list of features presented in a checklist-like table
Romku also allows users to compare multiple profiles, search by keyword and filter by OS using faceted search, mark profiles as their favourites.
As Romku is a user driven content site, any member can submit new software, edit existing profile pages, and add screenshots.
History
Romku was born from personal experience. With the huge amount of software available for free (or not), it becomes more and more difficult to make an informed choice on the best software for a given job. Why would you choose X over Y when Z could actually the best one. Searching on google is proving difficult, especially for common tools such as 'converter' (audio, video, or text document). Looking up in wikipedia is not easier as the comparison pages usually shows 20 or 30 software in the same table without the ability to pick the top 5. Romku will try to answer these issues.
Why Drupal?
Why reinventing the wheel when everything to create a website is available by drupal or one of the thousand plugins freely available? At the same time, we know that bespoke code is always required.
Romku was originally using Drupal 6. The decision to migrate to Drupal 7 was made in September of 2010 before romku was even launched. Migrating to the new platform was going to be less painful when the site was in early stage rather than with a huge amount of content. Although some modules are still not totally ready, this was the right move and the site benefits from many features of Drupal 7.
Design
The design of the website has been kept simplistic on purpose. This is to ensure users can find easily and quickly the information they need. The left navigation shows the search box, the top categories and a stream of activity. At the top, the navigation gives quick shortcut to important pages such as explore, login, my favourites...
Modules Used
- apachesolr: faceted search (filtering by operating system)
- colorbox: Screenshots navigation, login screen
- ctools & views: Manage the favourites listing, display profile in a given category
- faq: Manage the FAQ
- feedback: Feedback form at the bottom right of the screen
- fivestar & votingapi:
- pathauto: Generate automatically user friendly urls
- rules: Trigger action when content is modified (e.g. give point to users)
- spambot: Stop spambot to register on the site
- webform: Manage contact form
Conclusion
The goal of Romku is to become the IMDB for software, with a catalogue containing all working software available today. This may well be over one million or even more but is achievable if the community will to contribute to the project.
