There's a module for that! Drupal architecture and module development

Some random observations on the usability of Drupal.org after 5 years of using it daily. I hope to expand on these in the future.

Provide automatic links between module pages and handbook pages

Documentation on Drupal.org is hard to navigate. Handbook pages are mostly disconnected from module pages, which doesn't encourage module maintainers to produce consistent documentation. The module project page (which is the center of operations for the maintainer) should contain blocks pertaining to the documentation, like:

• Book outline of documentation pages
• Latest comments on documentation

In addition, issues related to documentation (Component = "Documentation") should provide ability to link to document pages, or to create new pages that are related to this issue.

Project roadmap from issues

A project roadmap is a luxury if the module maintainer doesn't benefit from it - because she has other things more pressing to tend to. On the other hand, being able to manage one's own future releases is greatly beneficial, as it clearly sets up the expectations for module users, and helps the maintainer allot her time and energy to focus on important issues.

The use case is simple: Alice sifts through her issue queue, scheduling specific bugs and feature requests to be fixed in some future release (typically the next one). She can also create new feature requests for the features she plans to implement for the next release. This was one of the advices of Greg Dunlap (heyrocker)'s great talk at the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit 2010.

• Allow future releases to be created. They don't need a CVS branch or tag. They specify a release version that doesn't yet exist and that can have a due date. Cute: Can contain a release "name" like Ubuntu does.
• Allow issues to specify future releases. Issues currently only refer to the release in which the issue was found, which mostly applies to bugs.
• Produce "roadmap" display that lists all issues assigned to a specific release (whether future or past).

Module navigation tools

• Query and display all dependencies (both incoming and outgoing) of the current module, as specified in .info files.
• Provide API.drupal.org services to contrib modules :-)

Drupal social network: users and groups

• Follow users: There are a few users whose activities on Drupal (including Drupal Groups, Drupal Planet, Twitter #drupal, etc.) I'd like to follow. A bit like GitHub but aggregating more sources.
• Groups.drupal.org suffers from disconnectedness from the main hub. The new "Your Groups" tab leaves to be desired. I'd like to see my groups' activity in my dashboard.