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Appreciation for old school web dev

I just want to talk a bit about how we used to make websites, and how epic it is that it still works and is just as viable as ever 😄

I run a popular fan site for a TTRPG that's basically an anternative to DnD. Just for context, it gets about 30k visitors per month.

It's built almost entirely using good old HTML, a little connective PHP to separate components into files, a reasonable amount of vanilla CSS to make it neat and responsive, and a tiny sprinkling of vanilla JS to enable saving (into localstorage) for pages like the character sheet. No frameworks needed. And all the data is stored in markdown and json files, because I don't need a CMS at this stage.

Because it's basically entirely static pages, it's fast, secure, responsive and accessible by default 😀 And super easy to maintain of course.

I have nothing against frameworks of course (frontend, backend, etc.); they're amazing, and I'll probably have to rebuild this using one (or a CMS) in a few months' time. But they aren't always needed; especially when a website is still new and only has 1 contributor. Keep it simple, and sites start off great by default!

submitted by /u/Droces to r/webdev
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The new content metrics module discussed yesterday

The new content metrics module discussed yesterday

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.

submitted by /u/Droces
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Is there a good "internal metrics" module like this?

Is there a good "internal metrics" module like this?

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?

submitted by /u/Droces
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