CPAN should be a popularity contest. Why? There is tons of great stuff on CPAN, but knowing what is considered the best, most used, most stable, most loved, can be hard. Lots of people use search.cpan.org, but there needs to be better easier ways to capture their knowledge for the benefit of others.
There is a rating and reviews system, but most stuff has no rating or reviews, and you can't sort the results by ratings (as far as I can tell). Also the ratings interface isn't available from the pod doc pages of modules, only from the main page for the distribution, which is looked at less often. The review information for the distribution should be accessible in the right hand bar of all modules in the distribution.
But to get good data on usage and quality quickly, there should be more than that. What if you could create a user account on a cpan frontend website. You could use it to:
- Star distributions as favorites
- Get a homepage listing your starred modules and any news relating to them
- Quickly give a star rating and/or review to a distribution
- Get popularity ratings on distribution based on other user's stars and ranks
- See popularity based on the number of other distributions that depend on a particular distribution
- Include any of the above in searches
- Use a command line tool to submit information about what modules you're using in a given project
- Usual social network stuff, like linking to friends and professional contacts.
- Relate your account to accounts on other perl sites, like this one, so people can find you in all the different corners of the perl universe.
The distro level tools should always be available on module pages, in some mini form in the right hand nav, since those are the pages people are really looking at when they come to CPAN.
There has been a lot of talk about getting some "buzz" going about Perl, and this sort of thing just might help. CPAN is a great resource, but it can be a bit hard to deal with its breadth. I think a lot of great things have been done around annotating things on CPAN so far, and something like the above would just make it better, and help bring it all together, and maybe get some of those tools used a little more.
This is my first post here. Hello! :)
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