Last week I posted about a new module I'd built and published (in beta) that helps the contributors / editors of long-running sites visualise how their content has changed over time. It's called Content Metrics.

I'm building it for my team in the Maths Department at the University of Cambridge, but of course I'm designing it to be useful to pretty much any Drupal site.

Since my last post, I've done loads of little improvements. The biggest is an overhaul of the filters. I've moved the filters that apply to all charts to the top (as you can see in the screenshot), and made some of them into autocomplete inputs.

And I've added 2 new charts:

• The first new one counts up and displays all content that contains a particular "keyword" (or phrase); it can either count all the instances of each keyword, or all the contains containing at least once instance of it.
• The second one is similar, but it counts up all the content / nodes that reference a particular taxonomy term or node. For instance, we're using it to see how many nodes have referenced a particular tag each year.

My team liked it enough that they asked me to deploy it to one of our larger sites so they can use the info for their reporting to our stakeholders.

I'm keeping it in "Beta" state for now since it should be evaluated by the community to make sure it's stable and secure.

Give it a try and let me know if there are ways I could improve it for your use case 😄

Contributors, editors and other content maintainers of long-running Drupal sites should be able to easily see how their content has evolved over time. While analytics modules illustrate the consumption of our site content over time, we needed a tool to illustrate the creation of it.

To enable that, I've just published a new module called Content Metrics. It provides charts illustrating content activity, such as articles created per month over the past 12 months. It also has additional related charts (content type counts, and comments over time), and I'll add others soon.

My goal was to keep it very simple to start with, without loads of dependencies and without promising too much. It also needed to be helpful out-the-box, without requiring admins to spend ages setting it up.

Aren't there enough good modules like this already?

Before making this, I did a bunch of investigating of the current contrib modules, and I only decided to make this after confirming that there just isn't a simple, useful, well-maintained module that provided this sort of information in a a visual format (charts).

You're probably well aware of the many analytics modules: Statistics • Statistics Counter • Statistics Advanced • Statistics rolling period • Entity Metrics • Google Analytics • Page Analytics • AI Google Analytics • Visitors (Web Analytics) • Analytics

However they track site visitor data; they don't report on internal info.

There are also several modules that do report internal site info: Yet another statistics module • Statistics Pro • Metrics • Drupal Metrics • Prometheus Metrics • Users Metrics • Redirect Metrics • Cache Metrics • Server and Db metrics

However each of them had one or more of the following downsides: It didn't show helpful info about content over time, or it didn't show the data in charts, or it wasn't actively maintained, or it just took way too much time to set up. Most of them are great modules, but they're not what my team needs.

So if this is useful to your team or your clients, please give it a try and let me know how you'd like me to improve it; additional charts, exposed filters, different chart styles, etc.

Hi everyone. I've just had a discussion with my colleages (I work at the Uni. of Cambridge), and they'd love to have metrics of how content (and other entites) have changed over time; how content, comments, users, etc. have changed over the past days, weeks months, etc.

The idea is for the "editors" of a popular website - who have created a lot of content over a long period of time - to get an idea of how their content has changed over time, along with other helpful things like comments, user signups, etc.

I know there are a lot of typical analytics modules, but are there any good modules that calculates these sorts of things? And do they have nice charts like the attached pic?

*The attached pic is a mockup I just made to discuss this with my team, and to clarify what I'm wanting.

If no module exists like this, would it be helpful if I built it and put it on D.o?