Elements/Components/Add-ons organization

A little late to the party here but I think that there is nothing wrong using categories and tags because categories tend to be more cut and dry but that doesn’t mean that they always describe use. I think that a list of categories with a "None of the Above" on the input form and it gets misc’d.

I do agree with sirlancelot on the confusion or people’s pigeon hole fear. I would abandon categories for if it meant that the organization could be tighter. Tag clouds can be effective but search is often better especially if you have partial search.

One of the best sites, I think for finding things in different ways is Etsy.com. it uses many elements to format a query result set in ways you might not even think of but categories make it easier for me to find things. Personally the redesigned version of Mozilla Addons is killer as well.

Another item I would like to see is to version out stuff. I don’t see the point of keeping unsupported or unmaintained projects, they should either hit an archive or a dumpster if there are no audits, updates or downloads after a certain period. Yes, you will end up removing useful snippets from the main repo you will at least clear the decks. Even if you don’t do this a least used/downloaded might be a fun way for people to discover un known solutions and not build their own. (I actually think that this is better)

I too like tags more than categories.

I’m not sure that putting few categories instead of the tag based system helps users to find resources better.. There are currently tens (or close to hundred maybe?) of resources that do not fit to the above categories (I know you asked us to make suggestions for more categories, but still don’t think it’s a good option to use categories). For example I looked at the resources from the first three pages of Repository Items Support board and tried to fit those into the above categories, the following would go in to a "misc" category: Missing (SEO maybe, but not really), Easy Events, Locale Setting, ManagerManager, CALx, CopyYears, Modbak, Encryption, FileDownload, PHx, FancyUpload, SWFObject, DirectResize, CssSwitcher, CSS Star Rating, SuperPage, TooltipX, SendToaFriend, Print Documents, PHPFreeChat, FileDownloadPlugin, Distinct (Ditto Extender), GoogleMapMarker, GoogleMap, xslt..

And that’s just from the first three pages.. So misc category would have a lot of resources. Ok, granted, some of those resources that I listed could go in to the categories, I don’t know what YAPS category holds for example and I think that many users wouldn’t know either..

I think all that is needed is a good search along with the tagging based system. A search that can search from all of the fields that are used to input data when posting a resource, dates, version, resource type etc.. And talking about resource type, I think that it would be good to have the snippet / plugin / module type field in the resources. It could be a checkbox group where you could select multiple if your resource consists of snippet and a plugin for example.

A change that is needed for the tagging system is that it should recognize words like plugin and plug-in as the same. Or maybe do a similarity match (levenshtein, similar_text, metaphone, soundex) to the existing tags and suggest to the user if he would choose one of the existing tags instead of creating a new one. It would be good if the tags would be also managed by an admin on the top of it. If user posts a resource that has a new tag, the resource should be reviewed by the admin before it appears on the resource repository. It would require someone to do the work constantly, but would make sure that there wouldn’t be multiple tags that mean the same thing to clog up the system. There could be also other things that have an affect should the resource be reviewed or not (can’t think of one right now, but there could be something ).

So.. I agree with sirlancelot pretty much in every point. I vote NO for categories, too inflexible

Did someone just volunteer to to manage the tags, add-on approval and reviews and implement levenshtein suggestions for existing/proposed tags?

All kidding aside, a combination of default tags might be nice using a UI similar to ncrossland’s ManagerManager recent improvement after deciding upon some base categories/tags. I really like Sir Lancelot’s mockup too. I definitely am in favor of imposing some sort of constraint though so folks just aren’t going haywire with tons of tags describing every possible scenario/alternative. Some of the "primary tags" on Matthew’s mockup do a better job of capturing the intent and there are clearly missing categories, hence my request for input. Doze I think a lot of your noted omissions could be covered by including a few more proposed categories, heck, even mirroring Joomla’s categorization or thinking about splitting out a couple of things namely languages and templales (as previously mentioned) ala Expression Engine. Maybe we could limit the tags per item to a max of 2 "required" tags and 3 "user" tags with a matching/suggestion filter tossed in per Doze’s idea.

Dang good search limited to add-ons sure would be nice too. I think we could actually have this today with what coroico has done with Ajaxsearch lately. Shaun’s idea of aging out older stuff could be a really neat idea to explore. Heck maybe we could have a couple of sliders that served as thresholds on a few to filter out anything with fewer than X downloads AND a last updated/added date older than Y days ago.

Now something that I didn’t think about but that our new infrastructure (specifically Crowd) might simplify is how resources get added. Wordpress has an interesting system: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/about/

I clearly don’t know the right answer, but love seeing everyone’s ideas; keep the feedback coming!

FYI Crowd is Atlassian’s Single Sign On, I mention it since I didn’t know what it was until I looked up

It would seem given the timezone differences that I am very late to the party and I don’t have much additionnal ideas to provide except "great input guys !" If I understand correctly we’d go for :

• no categories
• pre-defined tags with limited number of them for each addon
• an improved search.

I think that’s a great mix and we’re on to something there.

Quote from: rthrash

(...) even mirroring Joomla’s categorization or thinking about splitting out a couple of things namely languages and templales (as previously mentioned) ala Expression Engine.

Maybe my english is at fault but I thought the categories would be dropped ?
Do you mean keep categories alongside tags ?

Quote from: rthrash at Apr 03, 2008, 02:23 AM

Dang good search limited to add-ons sure would be nice too. I think we could actually have this today with what coroico has done with Ajaxsearch lately. Shaun’s idea of aging out older stuff could be a really neat idea to explore. Heck maybe we could have a couple of sliders that served as thresholds on a few to filter out anything with fewer than X downloads AND a last updated/added date older than Y days ago.

Would the new resource repository application be done with MODx 0.9.6.x branch or 0.9.7?

If 0.9.6.x, I think that tvExplorer could be a good tool to do the search. Various information from resources are saved to TV’s and with tvExplorer, it’s pretty easy to build all kinds of complex search forms with filters and what ever.. I’ve used it in one site and was very happy with the results.. if heliotrope has time, I think that he could set it up very quickly..

If 0.9.7 branch, I think we could do a new search app for the resource repo..

EDIT: But I don’t know hows the speed with tvExplorer.. I guess it wouldn’t have much overhead.. What I’m really not happy with the current system is that it takes ages list anything. Don’t know if it’s Ditto or what takes the time, but it’s very slow..

@Doze : I think it has to do with the hacked 0.9.1 which is running the current modxcms.com, the new one will run 0.9.7

About tvExplorer : it would be a great idea, but I don’t know if Heliotrope is anywhere near porting it to 0.9.7... If you want to see how it works on a real-world website, check what Perrine and Heliotrope did here : http://www.deco-in.com/recherche-avancee

As for the selective feature (&parents parameter) in the latest ajaxSearch I have tested it, limiting it to a folder and it works fine it would definitely work way faster.

Hi folks,

About tvExplorer:
I have looked at xPDO a week ago and I will certainly port tvx but It will take a long time :-(
I need to get the xPDO logic first.
It’s a lot of work since there is also tveditor module to port.

In its current version tvx can render the document tree and limit the search to a folder and its children.
It Supports @BINDINGS and can manage almost any TVs

About the performance, most of the work is done by Ditto.

:-)

The new repository and entire site is waiting on a few tiny bits before we start letting folks at it to update. It’s definitely 097.

Another thing to consider with regard to having some base categories is the support forums structure. Having some buckets to dump in the support requests should make it easier to peruse down the road, especially when wanting to see what other folks are doing or running into.

Just to revive this stalled topic, to me tags == categories == taxonomy; the method of implementation is essentially irrelevant.

The "baseline categories", will probably wind up as much about organization of support threads in the forums as they will with anything else. It might help cut down on 30+ page support threads that become unwieldy to wade through without a lot of time on your hands. E.g., Ajaxsearch support thread sits in right now at close to 40 pages. How much nicer would it be to find a "Search" subforum and multiple post titles beginning with [Ajaxsearch] focused on specific issues (like UTF-8 stuff that went on for 3+ pages recently it seems). Alternate search snippets could be in there too (Flexsearch Form comes to mind), but everything would be loosely related at least.

This does raise the question of whether or not each snippet needs a primary tag (used for the forum categories), 1-2 secondary author tags (optional and I’m still conflicted on this one due to the user tags, next), and user tags (unlimited ... like Amazon’s user tags).