What makes this different from the other modules out there? (Document it on the project page)

Well... Not a whole lot except:

1. The other ones don't work for us (Acquia) for various reasons
2. We needed a D7 version
3. This one has a "slide" builder where you can position elements on slides and edit them.
4. This one isn't based on views or CCK even. It's totally tuned to just this purpose.

I think merging is an eventual option, but with no D7 options, and the exiting ones not really applicable for our needs, we had to roll our own, and I figured I might as well share. If it shakes out to be redundant in the next 4-6 months, I'll merge its functionality somewhere else.

My real goal:
1. Can you expand on that. It will help people to understand which module to use in which situation.

For argument's sake:
2. You could have upgraded the others.
3. Interesting.
4. This seems like a major part of #1

Okay, here's the full story:

We needed a rotating banner solution for http://drupalgardens.com. We looked at rotor, and views_cycle, etc. probably all of them. I don't think any had stable D7 releases at the time. Not to say we can't upgrade, we have and continue to upgrade a bunch of D7 mods, but upgrading is a significant time commitment and this project is not central enough to warrant it.

DrupalGardens is not using views (we may someday, but right now we're not ready to absorb that), so views_cycle was out of the question - although for D6, seems like a win.

Rotor had a complicated interface for us. We wanted to build something really simple to use. Ditto with many other options.

We also didn't want to rotating nodes, or blocks or anything like that. We wanted something which wasn't going to cause our slides to show up other places in the system (like the content listing pages).

Further, we really wanted to focus on the ability to get your slides just right w/o photoshop since we're dealing with a more consumer audience than most site builders.

In all honesty, we also needed something we could be maintainers on. DrupalGardens is a commercial product, and we are giving a TON back to the community in D7 core, media module, mailing list module, comment notify, path auto, etc etc. And it is great to contribute back to the community. In this particular case we needed something that really specifically met our usability requirements and it didn't seem fair to try and tred on the flexibility desired by others to suit our goal. Also, the time required to compromise there is not trivial. Sometimes that will happen, and sometimes it won't. I think every Drupal site builder understands that.

That being said, the primary goal of Acquia is build the capacity of Drupal. And if we build something cool, I'm going try to get it onto d.o. so others can use it. If they like it, great! submit patches, I'll give you cvs access, whatever. If it languishes as an Acquia side project and other projects mature and become flexible and usable enough that we want to replace this one, we'll probably do that and let die.

Best,
Jacob

P.S. Can I close this issue now? ;)

That all makes a ton of sense and the module does sound great and even unique with fundamental architectural differences from other modules.

Can you add it to http://drupal.org/project/rotating_banner ? Maybe a 1 sentence summary and a link here? Otherwise end-users won't know what they are getting and why it's different.

Done, thanks greg for doing the tough work of policing the module namespace. It's an annoying job, but someone's gotta do it :)

Best,
J

Just keeping track of this thread...

Is this available for sites not on Drupal Gardens?

@shinz83, it's better that you open new issues instead of changing titles, specially if you are comming up with someting that's unrelated with the original issue workflow.

Sure it is available outside gardens, just download and "play with it", as it is suggested in the project description. Good luck.

rafamd

My mistake on the title change. Did not mean to do that. Still getting used to the issues/forums layouts here. Thought i was titling my own comment.

Apologies to the community.