By drupalina on

last time I checked there were over 1500 modules just for 5.x alone... and counting.

Some of those modules are not as great as others. Some of those modules are doing pretty much the same as other modules.

So I thought, why not implement a star-rating system for those modules so that drupalers could get our head around those modules quicker.

I thought, maybe implementing a star-rating system (like fivestar) could also be helpful for forum topics on drupal.org

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

jfxberns’s picture

jfxberns commented

I firmly agree.

I had to develop a Joomla site for a friend. While I was unimpressed with Joomla, I did find their extensions directory very useful.

Look at the Joomla Extensions Directory http://extensions.joomla.org/ and compare it to the Drupal extensions directory--the Joomla directory had ratings and comments and that makes it far more robust and useful.

Ratings are fallible for sure; people become invested in their own work and try to promote it; users are not always accurate in their assessment of the quality of a module (for various reasons from malice to ignorance to just plain stupidity), HOWEVER, in aggregate, ratings do tend to fairly reflect the overall quality of the items rated. Good things get rated better than bad things.

I think that comments are necessary to go along with ratings. You can often judge the validity of a rating by the quality of the comment the user leaves. If the comment is lucidly written by somebody who shows a depth of knowledge on the topic, I take the rating far more seriously than a rating by a person who's comment is something like "d00d, this mod sux cuz it crashed my whole systme."

Comments attached to modules also can convey important information such as module and version incompatibilities--things that users need to know but the current Drupal module repository does not make obvious. (Users might find the information if they dig through the bug reports--but that does not put the information in the place where people generally browse to make decisions on whether they want to use a module.

There are about five other glaring issues I have with the Module directory, but I am saving those for later.

John Berns
Travel Guide
Travel Photographer

tdimg’s picture

tdimg commented

This is a Google Summer of Code project, more info: http://drupal.org/node/128546 and http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dc7m7h94_9htsrdn