CivicActions

It is well documented/recognized that Drupal is really not very good at picking and sticking with a nomenclature that makes sense to the un-indoctrinated. The recent user testing at UMN made that pretty clear.

As the person on the team who is often working on the configuration of a website and running into the language in the GUI and then explaining the newly built site to the client it is often not until I do the latter that I realize how convoluted some of words used in Drupal are.

What follows is a slightly edited stream of emails i sent to one of our internal lists as I dove into Panels 2 Beta 3 last week. I hope to glean a more concise set of instructions and recommendations from this experience, but figured in the spirit of “Release early, release often” I would post this just in time for the end of Module Monday.

Here is an (incomplete) rundown of the various 'similar/related node' type modules:

It should be pointed out that while related links is one of the oldest of the bunch, and has most features, it is not quite as flexible as people are looking for (which I think is the main reason for the other modules), and the UI is not always easy to understand.

Here is what I would like to see - a module that (on node creation/edition and also regularly refreshed on cron) provides a hook to allow various modules to add in some numeric factors for how that node relates to other nodes. These modules could have their own configuration (e.g. to only pull from certain vocabularies), and the central API would allow you to weight one module/factor against another (e.g. taxonomy similarity v.s. word similarity v.s. destination node votes or freshness).

It would basically then just dump this information into a table and provide it to views as a sort option (that would need to load a node from an NID passed in an argument to provide a 'relevant' sort). This would allow you to display it per content type or whatever. For bonus points there would be a way for Content Recommendation Engine or other modules with user specific input to add their influence to the final list.

Today's Module Monday is a quick one. I can't believe that for so long so many people have lived with the "node/add" page or the "Create Content" menu items as the primary way to add a new node to a Drupal site -- I can't believe I put up with this for so long! Well, last November I was working on a project and we ran up against this "problem", it was particularly acute due to the use of Organic Groups.

I started work on the coder module a little over a year ago, as a response to an internal engineering meeting where were discussing Quality Assurance code reviews, and said "we should have a module to do that."

At OS/CMS I briefly introduced coder in the Lightning Talks session.

While in Barcelona, pre-conference, I gave a Drupal Dojo titled Upgrading your contrib modules to D6? Coder module can help!.

Views 2 Alpha 2 has been released (and it kicks ass), but views is still many patches away from a stable fully-featured release. This is blocking many drupal 5 sites from upgrading to drupal 6. Earl Miles has laid the groundwork and is now calling on the community to help get views 2 out the door.

Download or CVS-checkout views 2, install it, try to replicate your favorite view and see what features are missing or broken -- there are plenty.