Proposal: Visibility for Drupal and contributors

Objectives

1. Providing a mechanism through which Drupal users can contribute back to the Drupal community.
2. Encourage development of Drupal, contributed modules, and documentation.

Contributions are made to Drupal as altruism, and also for a variety of other reasons (e.g. makes code easier to maintain). This suggestion is about adding one more such incentive.

Proposal

Provide administrators with an option to display info on their site about Drupal (code and documentation), and installed contributed modules. The info displayed for each item includes a link to site of the developer.

This will make contributors more visible to visitors of Drupal powered sites. More importantly, Google will give a higher page rank to drupal.org and the sites of contributors.

Example

Take the case of John's help desk module (fictitious developer and module).

If the module is installed on a site, and the administrator switches on the option to show info about it, a page will be created for the site with info and links for the module. The more sites that feature this page of info, the higher John's site will feature on a Google search for "help desk".

Higher Google page rank for "help desk" will drive more traffic to John's site looking for a help desk solution. Which may result in clients:

• rewarding him for work he's already done (i.e. setting up a help desk for them)
• sponsoring him to make further development on the help desk module

Drupal would benefit as people searching for particular functions would become aware of Drupal. Also contributors would have an extra incentive to develop, contribute, document and maintain their Drupal project.

Details

First off, the word optional is very important - no one should be forced to displaying this info on their site, and there should be no penalties for not displaying it.

Also what info is shown should be highly configurable, not just an all or nothing option.

Where should Drupal info be displayed?

Ideally, an unobtrusive "Powered by Drupal" link in the footer of each page of the site, which links through to an "About Drupal" page on the same site.

What to include on the "About Drupal" page?

Introduction to Drupal, and links to drupal.org (more info, handbook, themes, modules, translations...).

'Documentation contributors'
Link to a page listing documentation contributors, where contributor's site's can be linked to. Maybe set a minimum number of handbook pages required to be included in this list.

'Core developers'
Link to a page listing core developers, with links to their sites. This is where developers can be acknowledged for their contributions to the core.

'Module used on this site'
List of modules enabled on the site, each module listed is a link to a page (on same site) about the module.

What to include on module info pages?

Introduction to the module, a link to the module project page on drupal.org, the name of the developer(s) and a link to their site. Also, if relevant, a link to the sponsor.

Administration

I suggest creating a Support Drupal module to manage and display the information about Drupal and it's contributors. A "Support Drupal" menu item at the bottom of Administration could lead to configuration for what info is displayed.

On the developer's side, we would need to include the information to be displayed somewhere in the distribution, both for Drupal core and contributions. Suggestions?