Drupal Modules

I've redesigned the site navigation bar. The goal of this redesign was two-fold:

1. Highlight key areas of the site with large buttons.
2. Add room for more feature links, like the "most favorited" list.

The color scheme and overall look did not change very much, the main difference is in how the space is being used.

In other news, this week's Reviewer of the Week is Heather James. Heather has submitted more than 10 high-quality reviews, making her one of the most active reviewers on the site!

It's now possible to rate reviews as helpful or not helpful. At the bottom of each review is a green checkmark for "yes" and a red x for "no".

These ratings will be used to build a list of top reviewers, and possibly to sort reviews by helpfulness, once enough data has been collected.

At the moment, anonymous voting is enabled. I'll be watching the data closely, to see how reasonable the results are. I hope this will pave the way for even higher quality reviews, and bring more recognition to the top reviewers.

Speaking of top reviewers: This week's Reviewer of the Week award goes to Scott at DesignDivide, for posting a number of useful reviews.

Update: I forgot to mention, the New Modules Feed now contains author information, so if your RSS reader supports it, you can now see who wrote the module, and get a link to their user page. Thanks to Moshe for the suggestion.

I've got several new and exciting features for you today!

The first is the New Drupal Modules tracker. This list is updated once a day with descriptions of every new module released on Drupal.org.

Modules will only be announced when the maintainer has actually published a release to their project page. This is important because it keeps unfinished modules off the list until they're ready to use (or at least download).

Best of all, this list is available as an RSS Feed! Now you can stay up to date on the newest modules right from your news reader.

But wait, there's more! I've created an RSS feed for the Top 10 Drupal Modules, sorted by rating. Now you can easily syndicate a copy of the top modules list on your own site (Tip: Use the Aggregator core module to create a new block).

And, I've added a new RSS feed for the Latest Module Reviews! The reviews feed is designed to be extra useful. The title field is actually a combination of the module name and the review title, and when you follow the link, it will take you right to the module page. This is another great source of syndicated content for your website.

And now for Reviewer of the Week:

This week the honor goes to Harry Slaughter. Harry has submitted a ton of useful reviews: 10 of them, in fact, making him the second most active reviewer on the site! Be sure to check out his excellent Drupal blog, DevBee.

I've added a Most Favorited Modules list to the site!

It's been a little over 2 weeks since the Favorite Modules feature was introduced, and users have been steadily adding modules to their favorites. Already, some interesting trends are emerging. As you might expect, most of the big name modules made the top 10, but there's a few surprises, too.

I've posted an article over on Blamcast about my initial interpretations of this new data. It will be interesting to see how the list changes over time, at the moment, the rankings are very close.

This list will continue to be improved upon, and more user-related features are coming soon. I'm also looking at implementing various RSS feeds to help keep you up to date.

In other news, a few people asked me to make link buttons, so here they are: Feel free to copy these images to your server, or just link them directly.

80x15 pixels

80x30 pixels

And now for Reviewer of the Week:

This week the honor goes to StephTheGeek, a long-time member of the site who recently contributed a number of useful reviews. Steph also has one of the most unique Drupal themes I've ever seen.

Reviewers-of-the-week get their site featured on the front page. If you'd like to be featured next week, sign in and post some reviews!

Drupal Code Search is my new, experimental search service aimed at helping developers find code easier.

Now you can easily search the source code of thousands of Drupal modules and themes, and filter the results by version and programming language.

Drupal Code Search also supports regular expressions, which means you can search for things like character ranges or wildcards.

More details on the about page.

The Most Downloaded section has been updated to use a more accurate counting method. If you've been keeping track, you might notice some modules showing lower numbers. This is the improved accuracy at work :)

The download section was also upgraded to use paging, so it's now possible to view hundreds of pages of results, rather than just the top 50.

I've also increased the minimum review count required to make the Top Rated list. A module must now have at least 3 reviews to be listed.

And, believe it or not, I found a way to optimize Module Finder even further. Database queries now run 80% faster than before, on average.

This week's Reviewer of the Week is bartekg, who recently posted a number of useful reviews. Normally, the reviewer of the week gets a link to their site, but bartekg's site is not open to the public yet. In the mean time, here's another link to Matt Tucker, who still holds the record for most reviews submitted.

And stay tuned, I'll be launching something new tomorrow soon...

Based on your suggestions, I've added a "Favorite Modules" feature to the site. You can now tag modules you visit as favorites just by clicking a link.

This is a great way to keep track of modules you might want to revisit later. Sharing your list with friends is easy, just send them your "view" link. You could even post it on your website! Here's my list.

This is the first in a series of user-related improvements I have in mind for the site. Here's a few others you might see sometime soon:

• Most Favorited Modules list.
• "Is this review helpful?" rating system.
• Most Helpful Reviewers list.
• Improved user profiles.

Have an idea? Or maybe just a bug report? Post it in the forum!

And now for The Reviewer of the Week:

This week the honor goes to Matthew Tucker, aka Ultimateboy. Matt has been posting quality reviews since almost day one, and with 11 reviews posted, he's taken first place in terms of quantity, too!

Reviewers-of-the-week get their site featured on the front page. If you'd like to be featured next week, sign in and post some reviews!

I've added an exciting new feature to the site! It's called "Module Finder".

Module Finder is a blazing fast, state of the art, jQuery powered search engine. It was built from the ground up to find modules faster than anything you've ever seen. Search results are returned as you type, executing in as little as 12ms!

Give it a try, I think you'll like it :) If you have any feedback, suggestions, or bug reports, please post them in the forum.

[Update@19:30 - I just made some performance and usability improvements to the interface. It updates roughly 4x faster now, and I replaced the opacity fade-out with a simple spinner animation.]

I've also fixed a few IE-specific CSS bugs on various parts of the site. Refresh the page if something doesn't look right.

In other news, I want to thank everyone who's submitted module reviews! You guys are my inspiration. Keep the reviews coming, and I will do my best to make this site even better.

Further thanks goes to everyone who linked to the site, especially DrupalSites.net and DrupalCenter.de, for giving me front page coverage.

Finally, I want to congratulate Geshan for becoming the first official Reviewer of the Week! In addition to posting a number of useful reviews, Geshan actually wrote up an in-depth review of this very website.

Reviewers-of-the-week get their site featured on the front page. If you'd like to be featured next week, sign in and post some reviews!

I updated the module system to take advantage of the new "status" field available on Drupal.org project pages. It's mostly a cosmetic change, helping to point out which releases have "recommended" status, and which are simply "development snapshots". You'll now see the status listed under the release notes column in the downloads section of every module.

I also added a fix to the module list to make it display which category you're looking at in the title bar, and fixed the "more" link on project descriptions so that it no longer interferes with the "back" button.

There's also a few small changes to how the highest rated and most downloaded module lists look. The "highest rated" list now shows how many ratings a module has.

And work has begun on a new module listing system. More details on that soon.

I've written up some basic rating guidelines for those having trouble deciding on a rating. These are just suggestions, so use your best judgment if they don't apply to your situation.