I've been building Drupal sites for a while and the persistent "There's a new version of Drupal" or "There's a new version of the theme" errors in all the admin pages has always driven me nuts.

I get that security updates are important, but I really don't think it's necessary to constantly be nagging admins about it. Especially when there are legitimate reasons why you haven't applied updates.

https://preview.redd.it/vohq7euvufog1.png?width=2616&format=png&auto=webp&s=b8dfc79e8584026a6c72bdb28dd60903a1409d50

After a while you start to cognitively filter it out. It contributes to "alert fatigue" and I think is an overall detriment to the Drupal site building experience.

Is there some back story about why you can't permanently dismiss the alerts or at least snooze them?

Does anyone have a good module recommendation to do so if someone's tried?

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 😄

If you are running a simple site and want some insights into its traffic with zero configuration, or you feel overwhelmed by the complexity of Google Analytics, or you simply respect users’ privacy and definitely do not want to show visitors yet another cookie consent popup, there is now a module for that.