Alright, as I have been using this site pretty regularly, I started thinking about what would make my life easier. The answer came to me after John added the 'Favorite Modules' feature (which I think is great).
When creating new sites, you often download the same modules many, many times. This lead me to this idea.. There might be a better way to implement, and I, personally, have not worked through all the details, but here goes:
The favorite modules page should have a checkbox next to each modules. After checking off a few modules, and clicking a 'download selected' button, all of the selected modules would be downloaded as one compressed file.
This idea could even be implemented across other areas of the site, by adding selected modules to a 'download shopping cart'.
I know it is kinda in its dream stages right now, but, what do you think?!
Comments
Hard to do right
John - March 24, 2008 - 11:28
It's interesting, but I see two problems:
1. I don't host the downloads locally, they just redirect to the official FTP, so I don't have any way to bundle them.
2. You'd have to keep track of which version you wanted, and that might change with time.
Yup..
Ultimateboy - March 24, 2008 - 15:36
Those were the exact two things that I came up with.. I do not see how to get by those two issues, but it would save a lot of time if you ever came up with a way to get it to work.. I will think about it for a while, and get back to you if I come up with anything.
--
--Matthew Tucker
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Maybe you guys are over
jmelnik - April 1, 2008 - 14:33
Maybe you guys are over thinking it a little. It would be a great convenience even to just create a "shopping cart" of sorts of modules to download, then just serially download them the way they are downloaded now. Perhaps even offer a way for people to keep multiple download carts. Almost like the way wishlists are implemented in newegg.com.
No it's not as nice or fancy as having one tarball of all the modules but for me unzipping isn't the labor intensive part. It's finding, navigating, and clicking download for the modules i use the most. Just being able to keep a couple of lists of frequent drupal configurations and clicking to download once would be a HUGE help.
just an idea....
This already exists
John - April 1, 2008 - 14:45
In theory, Installation Profiles are what you're looking for...
Sort of-- but those are
jmelnik - April 1, 2008 - 20:48
Sort of-- but those are someone else's view of what should be included for a particular purpose. There are as many views of that as there are drupal admins, lol.
I was thinking more along the lines being able to download what I put in "favorite modules" with one click (serially, separate tarballs is fine). It's more akin to managing multiple wish lists. I have a set of modules I download every time I do a d5 install, I now have a set of modules I download every time a do a d6 install. And I pretty much can guarantee my list is different from everyone elses. I know it's different than the installation profiles. It would be nice to have one download link that serially downloads the latest recommended release for each module in my "basket".