Wim Mostrey Engaging Drupal

In my effort to make the Drupal Planet more efficient as part of the drupal.org redesign plan I've set up a prototype of a lightweight Digg-like Drupal Planet. I'm glad to present Drupal Digest. The concept consist of two pages. First there is the list of Unfiltered articles, which is basically what you get on the current Drupal Planet: the aggregated content of everyone on the Planet, with the newest articles listed first. So the people who are happy with the current Planet can still enjoy it as-is.

To make things more interesting I added a voting mechanism so people can vote on articles they find interesting, innovative, funny or in any way worth looking into. Articles that get enough votes appear on the Popular page, which also acts as new homepage. So people who don't have time to wade through the Drupal Planet and Drupal Talk for interesting articles can just take a quick look at the homepage, or the feed, to see what the Drupal community filtered out as quality content. The threshold is currently 5 votes but in the actual implementation this could/should obviously be raised.

I tried to keep things as simple as possible: the mechanism requires no log-in, comments are disabled since they should go on the actual article and by providing a feed you don't even have to pass through the site to see the complete article: just like the Planet feed you just click on the "read more" link to go directly to the original content. If enough people like the idea we can always add the bells and whistles of geotagging and mapping in the same way that the NowPublic Drupal Scan does.

Here's a complete list of contributed modules I used for the site:

• FeedAPI, FeedAPI Node and SimplePie parser as part the FeedAPI module
• Views and Views UI as part of the Views module
• Plus 1 for the voting mechanism and the VotingAPI module it requires