Hi - first post - I'm really excited about Backdrop. Been struggling with D8, and had to abandon a Commerce website in D8 because I couldn't get to grips with Composer. So it was a real pleasure to discover Backdrop :)

One thing I must feed back to you is that the Add Ons pages on the website could do with enhancing. Currently you find a module by searching for the name. That approach assumes that you know what you're looking for. Quite often module names have no bearing on their functionality.

So I'm suggesting that these pages add some extra filters so we can search modules by category, popularity etc, much like on Drupal's website. Some sorting options would be useful, also. Likewise, this approach could be adapted more fully on the modules install pages within Backdrop itself.

I think this would make things much easier for people to plan and build their websites. Should be fairly easy to achieve on the website with Views, no?

Most helpful answers

Welcome!

You raise a good point, and one that has been under discussion for some time. There is recent traction on the issue I believe, although it was originally filed in 2013.

This issue deals specifically with the ability to add tags to modules to help categorize them, which I am assuming will feed into the projects section on Backdropcms.org – although it couldn't hurt to add an issue to the queue here to make sure it doesn't slip through the cracks:

Unless this one covers it well enough:

Comments

Welcome!

You raise a good point, and one that has been under discussion for some time. There is recent traction on the issue I believe, although it was originally filed in 2013.

This issue deals specifically with the ability to add tags to modules to help categorize them, which I am assuming will feed into the projects section on Backdropcms.org – although it couldn't hurt to add an issue to the queue here to make sure it doesn't slip through the cracks:

Unless this one covers it well enough:

Being able to sort search results would be helpful as well. 

But this is not going to be a simple fix without some coordination of efforts. See my comment at https://github.com/backdrop/backdrop-issues/issues/1517#issuecomment-385...

Does this need to be a META? Seems like quite a few moving parts. We need changes to core (Project Installer), contrib (although we can update core projects as a best practice example to get things moving), BackdropCMS, and the packaging script. Probably multiple changes each.

This is why I've given up on the tags issue https://github.com/backdrop/backdrop-issues/issues/37. I think doing that, by itself is not going to move us significantly more forward from where we are now.

The BackdropCMS code to make tags useful is probably the biggest bottleneck IMO. 

 

jenlampton's picture

Issue #37 is going to get tags on modules, which will at least give us a new/better way to search existing projects on backdropcms.org. But that's not likely to get in until 1.12 (Jan 15).

We already have designs for the modules/themes/layout pages that include other filters. I'm going to take a stab at doing that part now (and maybe fix the search relevancy bug too).

On Jan 15 we just need to add another exposed filter for the new module tags.