Does this really belong on Drupal Planet?

I certainly hope so.

This is bringing together some of the most exciting technology in drupal.. Activity Stream has been incredibly useful to a number of our clients; one of the things holding people back from further adoption is the ability to tie it together with views in a coherent manner that can help developers and users connect the dots between all of their online services.

Well, it’s working now. I’ve also submitted a patch with a few sample views that I think people would want, as well as a theme plugin for views that makes it look like the original.

I consider this fairly interesting stuff; however if you’ve got other ideas of what you’d like to hear about — please, by all means — I’m all ears.

Can you imagine if everyone posted their pet issue to planet?

Given that the stated purpose of Planet is to aggregate Drupal-related blog posts, I guess I’m missing how Aaron’s post isn’t relevant.

I don’t know if you read the d.o thread linked in the article, but it’s a pretty salient patch to social networking functionality. This post is both Drupal-related and relevant to almost anyone exploring social networking… I don’t get it. What’s with the hate?

Hi,

Thanks for jumping to the (incorrect) conclusion that I have hatred towards Aaron.

Many people complain that planet is overrun with unimportant things. I now have two tags on my blogs - one for planet drupal and one for Drupal topics that don’t deserve to be in the Drupal planet. This has been the standard for planet additions for several months now. Since coming up with a rule for planet posts is near impossible people have started to provide feedback directly to bloggers to let them know how they feel about the post.

Let’s judge the merit of the post by the overall community response. Two people felt that this post was off-topic enough to actively leave a comment letting you know that. Zero people commented to thank Aaron for bringing this issue to their attention.

The issue that this links to received additional comments, but only from people who had already commented on it.

So, apparently this topic is not interesting to people.

Thanks.

lolwut

[edit]

Greg,

I see 2 people + the module maintainer commenting on the path thread (3 people) and 2 here complaining that it’s OT. I don’t even know what the Google Analytics look like.

I get what you’re saying about Planet — don’t get me wrong, I’m not discounting the need for relevant posts being aggregated. But we need a measurable standard by which to judge where a blog should or should not be aggregated. What are the metrics by which this can be decided?

For the record, I support the goal. What needs to be defined is how /specifically/ the community defines it, and how the community can enforce it. I would love to collaborate with you on this and see if we can’t make something that fills this community need (if it is in fact a community need).

-Dom

ps. lolstrawman; you know what I meant by “what’s with the hate?”

Greggles,

I consider this issue to be perfectly relevant on planet. I think I may have erred in the selection of a title for this post. This wasn’t intended as a “Oh hi, we’re patching stuff, lol.” It was more a notice that there are some interesting things going on in module land (in particular, one that two people in this company are collaborating on).

For the record: I (nor anyone else here) have any question about whether you dislike me; that wasn’t the concern. No worries there whatsoever.

We’ve had a handful of traffic directed to this entry (analytics don’t lie). I have no question that it’s useful information. A lack of comments on this particular page is not necessarily indicative of popularity. It just means that people haven’t commented.

Your note on separating tags between planet-relevant posts and random drupal discussion is noted however. We’ll consider that as a shop-wide rule. I cannot mitigate what others feel is drupal-planet worthy, as that is (and shall continue to be, for the time being) predominantly an exercise for the reader.

Thanks!

Hey Greg:

I've been scouring Drupal.org and Google looking for guidelines for Drupal Planet. I've talked to a few folks about this over the year (for those of you who don't know, it's a long standing debate), and largely I'm inclined to agree with you that the signal to noise ratio is high on planet sometimes.

That said, I'd really like to move this conversation to some kind of productive conclusion, otherwise we're all just wasting time we could be coding or contributing. :)

I read the ticket:
http://drupal.org/node/292961

Currently Drupal Planet's definition is: "Planet Drupal aggregates the Drupal-related blog posts of:" ... and has a list of people who contribute.

In the original post on this in 2005 (http://drupal.org/node/31026), the guideline was:

• The blog must be written in English. Drupal is quite an international project and English is the only language that probably everybody around the world will understand.
• We currently only aggregate Drupal-related content. So in order to be added, either your whole blog should be Drupal-related, or you should provide us with a feed which only contains your Drupal-related posts. This is quite easy to achieve with Drupal itself, simply create a category "Drupal" and file all your Drupal-related posts in there.

I really don't see how this is out of line. However, I do respect you (as I know you know), and I have talked to the guys about whether this would be appropriate - they think it is. If you really have an issue with this kind of content, I'd like to have a rational discussion with you - maybe we can submit some guidelines about what you think would be appropriate for Planet.

Coming out as strongly as you did on this post might be construed as flame bait. We're one community, and we're all first name friends here, so let's put down the flame throwers and see if there is something positive we can get out of this. Dom extended the olive branch, and I'd like to second that.

What's super cool about this is that it lets you embed ActivityStream into views finally (it's been a long outstanding issue in the issue queue). This means you can finally tie in Flickr, Twitter, and other services to nodes with the ActivityStream module with this patch, and that's something I've talked to a lot of people about wanting to do. You can take this and build different views for services or even do some super interesting things with node aggregation. It's not so much a pet issue - it might not be a major contribution but I know of a few folks who have been waiting for this patch.

If we work cooperatively, I think we might be able to take away some value from all this.

Greg, please get in touch with me if you'd like to discuss this with me. I'd be happy to put together some guidelines (which I totally would post to Planet, right? :) and see what the community thinks (is there something in the issue queue I'm not seeing?).

Peace brother. I hope you are otherwise well.

As strongly as I did? Note that the first anonymous comment isn’t mine. I just asked what would happen if everyone’s favorite issue were added to the planet? I think that’s a legitimate question.

The WorkHabit blog (at least in terms of what gets aggregated into the planet) has been low volume and high signal/noise for a long time with about 1 post per month. Then in the past ~week there were 5 posts. The 5th and 6th there were 4 posts in 2 days even. So that’s a bit of a change. I do encourage you to use this to promote the things that are most important to you, but we all agree that there is a line.

As exciting as that change to activity stream is, I don’t know how to describe it other than a “pet” issue. Activitystream module was downloaded 318 times in July. That puts it in the bottom 1% of all downloads that were tracked.

I too would like to gain something from this. To bring broader resolution to the signal/noise issue I filed an issue as soon as I realized (from this thread) just how broadly the Planet was defined - http://drupal.org/node/292961

Nice work. That’s definitely a better forum to discuss this in :).