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Table of Contents
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Choosing a glossary-type module
G2 is not intended as a direct replacement for the glossary module already available with drupal for quite some time now. It was designed for slightly different needs, and this page is here to help you choose which module you should probably be using, or if you should really write your own. Lexicon has been evolved from glossary to accomodate yet another set of requirements, and glossify started with needs similar to glossary, but evolved to a much more diverse set of features; only those relevant to glossaries should be listed here.
Left-to-right order by date of creation. Empty cells means info not yet available. Please contribute !
TODO: import “features discussion” from the 2008 glossary comparison table, which updated the very obsolete http://drupal.org/node/266511, currently unavailable for edit except to members of the Drupal doc team due to the Full HTML format, but has now become partly obsolete itself. The 2008 chart is now imported.
| Feature | Glossary | G2 | Glossify | Lexicon | Refactoring |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Drupal-related | |||||
| Drupal 7.x | No | No(t yet) | No(t yet) | Yes | Yes |
| Drupal 6.x | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Drupal 5.x | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| Drupal 4.7.x | Yes | Yes | No | No | No |
| Drupal 4.6.x | Yes | No | No | No | No |
| Earlier Drupal versions | Yes | No | No | No | No |
| AJAX | No | Some autocompletion | |||
| Storage | terms | nodes, 1 content type | nodes (types ?) | any entity | |
| Revision support | No | core | core | ||
| Simpletest | No | A few | Yes | ||
| Services provided | |||||
| multiple glossaries on one site | Yes | No | No | Yes | |
| RSS feeds on entries | core | No | core (?) | ||
| RSS feeds on additional vocabularies | No | core | core | core | |
| classify entries | No | core taxonomy | core taxonomy | core fields | |
| commenting on entries | No | core | core | core, only on node storage | |
| private editorial information | No | Builtin | Use CCK | core fields | |
| alphabar maintenance | automatic | manual | defaults + override | ||
| remote glossaries | No | Yes, limited | Yes | ||
| i18n | |||||
| Translation template supplied | Yes | Yes | |||
| Multilingual blocks | No | ||||
| Feature blocks | |||||
| Alphabar | No | Yes | Use Views | Default View | |
| Daily | Yes | Yes | Use Views | Default View | |
| Latest | No | Yes | Use Views | Default View | |
| Random | Yes | Yes | Use Views | Default View | |
| Search glossary | Yes | No | No | Yes | |
| Content filtering | |||||
| automatic | Yes | No | Yes | ||
| automatic, stop list | Single language | No | i18n support | ||
| explicit | No | Yes, dfn element | Yes, custom element | ||
| auto “title” on links | No | No | Teaser / Disambiguation | ||
| Disambiguation pages | n.a. | Yes, limited | default + override | ||
| Disambiguation targeting in links | n.a. | No | Yes, on explicit | ||
| 3rd party integration | |||||
| Quality Agent | No | No | Yes | ||
| Views: basic | core | core + specific | core + specific | ||
| Views: default views | No | No | Yes | ||
| Wikipedia | No | No | Yes, with i18n | ||
| Zeitgeist | No | No | Yes | ||
| Performance | |||||
| memory needs/number of entries | O(n) | O(1) | O(n) (?) | ||
| speed on small glossaries | faster | slower | slower | ||
| speed on large glossaries | slower with size | remains constant | slower with size | ||
| Themeing | |||||
| - home page | core | ||||
| - search form | Yes | core | core | ||
| - node overview | Yes | core | core | ||
| - definition fields | n.a. | Yes | Use CCK | core fields | |
| - each feature block | n.a. | Yes | Use Views | ||
| Implementation | Templates | Theme functions | Templates | ||
| Developer features | |||||
| XML-RPC API | No | alphabar latest top random word of the day | No | ||
| Web services security | n.a. | IP-based access control throttling | n.a. | ||
| UI module separate from Data API | No | No | Yes |
Obviously, in all cases, a “No” actually means: “roll your own ”, as in all Open Source software.
Documentation
Drupal 4.x to 6: Rationale for G2 specificities
- Optimization for large glossaries: this is the need expressed by OSInet, which funded development, to support its 5000+ term glossary of computing, for which glossary.module, even when coupled with flexinode to bind blob content to terms, is not really efficient enough.
- Single glossary: multiple glossaries were not necessary to OSInet, which funded development
- Explicit linking to terms with dfn elements:
- limits system workload
- allows invisible marking of entries made of other entries. Think: XML-RPC, points to XML and to RPC with glossary.module and various wiki filters, but can point to 'XML-RPC' with G2. Wrapping XML-RPC in quotes is necessary to allow linking to this entry in glossary, but the quotes remain visible, degrading the UI.
- allows redactor-level choice of
- whether to link to an entry: glossary always links if the term matches, which is not always meaningful (“and” can be present in a glossary and you don't want “and” to be linked from in all nodes on the site).
- where to link to an entry: glossary allows only a predefined set of positions (first, last or all matches)
- nodes vs terms: this is the most salient difference.
- Using custom nodes (g2_entry in g2.module) allows large definitions, with the complete drupal feature set for nodes,
- Using terms (glossary.module) allows definitions to be bound to custom nodes instead of being nodes on their own
- Alphabar maintenance: large glossaries will most of the time use all available initials, so the processing cost of maintaining it is not justifiable