Currently, there are both a "Commerce and Advertising" and an "e-Commerce" module categories. I find it hard to distinguish between Commerce and e-Commerce, especially since we're dealing with website systems. Glancing through that category shows mostly advertisement related modules, a few PayPal modules, and a few cross posted modules from the e-Commerce category.

I'd like to make two recommendations. One I feel is necessary, the other is open for debate.

1) The "e-Commerce" module category should be changed to "E-commerce." It may seem like nitpicking, but E-commerce is the generic term and certainly what you'd expect given that all the other module categories are capitalized correctly. Further, there is a specific module package called "e-Commerce" which brands itself w/ the capital C while this module category is supposed to handle other systems like Ubercart (currently 10+ modules posted here besides the core project). Ultimately, I'd love to see subcategories so it's more clear that e-Commerce isn't the only option (Ubercart is pretty low to the bottom of the list ; ), but I know that's another discussion entirely... so in the meantime, I'd love it if the category was changed to the more generic "E-commerce" instead of the distinctly branded title.

2) Perhaps "Commerce and Advertising" should be changed to simply be "Advertising". Then there would be no confusion... A generic "E-commerce" category would easily absorb all the commerce modules, and folks looking for advertisement modules won't have to wade through the modules cross posted in "Commerce and Advertising" and "e-Commerce." Then if a module genuinely provides both E-commerce and Advertising features, it can legitimately be cross-posted between the two categories.

Thanks for your time.

Comments

Island Usurper’s picture

Island Usurper commented
Component: Textual improvements » Site organization

As if I would say otherwise, +1 to this.

More and more people are going to be developing modules to work with Ubercart, and the right thing for them to do is contribute them here in the module repository. But to encourage this, there needs to be a place for us to say "put it here". The current situation doesn't facilitate that.

catch’s picture

catch
he/him
Primary language English
commented

Both suggestions sound good to me.

rszrama’s picture

rszrama commented

I just noticed that module categories related to specific module categories have help text that pops up on hover. Maybe a way to temporarily solve the lack of subcategories would be to make the title for the E-commerce group be a little more explicit:

"Includes general e-commerce modules and modules developed for e-Commerce and Ubercart."

rszrama’s picture

rszrama commented

Wanted to revisit this as we're looking to put up Uber 1.0 soon. There are now 20 modules in the e-Commerce category that explicitly relate to Ubercart and several others that don't relate to either e-Commerce or Ubercart.

Also, I didn't realize it, but Ubercart itself is currently straddling the fence between the two commerce related categories.

So a review of the action points:

  1. Change Commerce / Advertising to just Advertising.
  2. Change e-Commerce to E-commerce and set its title to "Includes general e-commerce modules and modules developed for e-Commerce and Ubercart."
  3. Move modules out of Advertising to E-commerce where appropriate.

If the issue is just needing to find the time to do it, I'd volunteer to be on the webmaster team to address this issue and others as necessary.

greggles’s picture

greggles
he/him
Primary language English
Location Denver, Colorado, USA
commented

In general, I'm in favor of all three of these action items.

For point 2, I agree with changing the title, but I'm not sure about changing the word. A quick review of the internet at large didn't show a real preference for a capitalized E or for using a hyphen or not. Do you have a good reference on that?

Another possible action to help people find Ubercart modules is to create a page (perhaps in the d.o handbook) of "Contributed Modules for Ubercart" which links to all of the contrib modules. The Token project page has a link to a wiki page on g.d.o that lists all the modules that use token.

Does anyone else have a feeling on this? Otherwise I'll go ahead with the proposed changes (aside from the term name, unless there's good evidence towards something else) in a few days.

rszrama’s picture

rszrama commented

Hmm... closest reference I could generate was an AskOxford page that says they don't have a specific policy, but their house rule for the concise dictionary (at least as of 2004) was a lower case e- prefix for "e" words w/ capitalization of the "e" at the beginning of a sentence. A general Google search does show quite a variety... but as far as I can tell, the d.o project is the only one with e-Commerce (although some pages capitalize both the E and the C and some just the C instead of a hyphen - eCommerce).

I think aesthetically I just don't like the e being lower case when all the other categories are capitalized.

I won't push hard on the actual name, though, if the other changes are good to go. I just brought it up given the fact that the category was originally named e-Commerce because that was the name of the specific project it was meant to contain... then we screwed everything up. : P

Also, I do like the idea of a handbook page indexing contributed modules designed for Ubercart. Thanks. : )

oadaeh’s picture

oadaeh commented

A general Google search does show quite a variety... but as far as I can tell, the d.o project is the only one with e-Commerce (although some pages capitalize both the E and the C and some just the C instead of a hyphen - eCommerce).

I think this is primarily due to lack of anything resembling standardization and general laziness of people. Try doing the similar searches for e-mail, and you're going to get similar results. I wouldn't use it as a metric.

silverwing’s picture

silverwing commented
Status: Active » Fixed

Queue Cleanup

I changed to term description per comment #4b - having a module named ecommerce made differentiating it from Ubercart a good idea (in my mind, at least.)

Didn't change the e/E part.

Status: Fixed » Closed (fixed)

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.