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By manicolaus on
This is an exciting piece of work and I feel a resonance with this technology that I didn't feel in Joomla or WordPress or DNN. As a kid I loved to play with my Erector set and as a grownup I loved the Lego techno sets. I've been building web sites in html since 1996, and I have this strong sense that the Drupal approach is the road of the future. But:
It would be helpful to newcomers like myself if the array of available modules were better organized and presented. It's fine that one can filter items by Drupal version (5, 6 etc.) and by project, but it's still too much of a jungle. Here are some suggestions for upgrading the display under the Download|Modules tab:
1) Highlight the handful of modules that provide the greatest all-around functionality. For example, Views, CCK, Wisywig API. Make it clear that these are basic building blocks. Right now, the display buries for example the CCK module unobtrusively in a laundry list of lesser pieces having more elaborate displays. There's no way to tell, without plowing through reams of documentation on other pages, that these modules are in a class by themselves. Put them into a primary list, or put them at the top of the list, or display them in some other distinctive way so that users can quickly appreciate them and find them.
2) Organize the modules by dependency. There's dozens of modules that depend on Views and maybe hundreds that depend on CCK. Arrange the display of modules so that each primary module is followed by a list of modules that depend on it.
3) Relegate modules that aren't ready yet, or that have been abandoned or deprecated, to a secondary register. Nothing is more frustrating than to plow through a long list of junk looking for the one or two items that might be useful. Unless the user is really tenacious, they'll give up searching through the junk and never get to the good pieces lower down the list. Highlight the good stuff. Relegate the rest to a junk box or a breadboard list. Don't mix them together.
Oh, and I hope that 7.0 will ship with an editor "out of the box." I don't know any other CMS that expects users to hand-code html tags in 'body' fields, as shipped. I know 'retro' is fashionable but that's off the deep end.
Comments
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Don't "wish" -- make it happen!
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