| Project: | Drupal core |
| Version: | 8.x-dev |
| Component: | statistics.module |
| Category: | task |
| Priority: | normal |
| Assigned: | Jan Krummrey |
| Status: | postponed |
| Issue tags: | D7UX, d7ux-microprojects, dashboard |
Issue Summary
UX miniprojects are here to encourage more User Experience people to participate in the Drupal Project.
Objective of this microproject:
To consider the design and functionality of a widget for the dashboard that would show recent traffic data statistics for your website
There is a corresponding Project Framework page for this element on D7UX.org here
Next steps:
- Post any information that's helpful for a newcomer to Drupal who will be addressing the UX aspects of this issue. Sceenshots are probably best, a demo site would be great.
- Leave a comment if you would like to volunteer as a DEVELOPER or USABILITY mentor for this issue.
- The UX Volunteer for this project is free to choose the channels and media to work in, but will use this issue to report their findings for review and feedback.
- Drop by in #drupal-usability in IRC and talk to Leisa or yoroy if you have questions or feedback on this process, this is a trial so any input on how to improve is appreciated.
Note that we do not expect the output of every microproject to be implemented or implementable. Any usability gains from this process are a boon to D7, but getting more UX people into the Drupal community and finding ways for them to work more effectively with developers are our core goals.
And please, play nice. The issue queue can be quite intimidating for newcomers so let's try to be extra welcoming here.
Go!
Comments
#1
UX Volunteer: Jan Krummrey (pending acceptance)
UX Mentor(s): TBC
Developer Mentor(s): TBC
#2
Count me on that.
Just a few questions to clear up what the scope of this project is.
It's ONE widget for site traffic.
Not the set of dashboards proposed in http://www.d7ux.org/dashboard/ , right?
#3
So who can help me out. What data does D7 core offer?
Page views (total) YES/NO
Page views (by date) YES/NO
Visits (total) YES/NO
Visits (by date) YES/NO
Referrer YES/NO
Anything else, that drupal might be tracking related to traffic?
There is a Google analytics API . I assume that other tracking services have something similar.
So for the long run or contrib that is a data-source that a widget could tap into.
Is there a weblog parser that a widget could get it's data from?
#4
Jan: we have Statistics module in core. it has this config screen:
it provides (some of) these links in the reports section:
which link to pages with tables like this:
catch pointed out http://drupal.org/node/142668 as maybe relevant to this.
#5
from Statistics: tracking referrers, page hits, etc.:
Here are my thoughts on that (trying to be verbose on what is going on in my head):
That doesn't give us the data to graph out traffic over time, right?
One could create a map of where the most recent visitors came from.
Or a list of top referring sites.
Does the data have a timestamp?
Or is it aggregated over the lifetime of the site?
Is this just the last visited pages as mentioned in 1.) ?
Will continue to dig into what's avaiable.Seems to be quite basic compared to what Google-Analytics or Mint have to offer…
Jan
#6
Assume anything can be made be available, what would be good to have? It's good to know what's there, now let that go and start sketching what you think should be in there in the 'ideal' situation.
#7
We should probably also compare the statistics that are available from Hall of Fame module (www.drupal.org/project/hof).
#8
So here are my first sketches:
My thoghts on these. I didn't try to build a full traffic analysis such as google analytics. That would be a dashboard module for contrib.
What the module in core should do is keep you updated on a quick glance. So I came up with a module that tracks pageviews as seen by drupal. Most administrators will look at that rather frequently so I assumed a one week timeframe that will be graphed. The timeframe is changable in the edit-screen.
The bars will not start a zero views since the scale would quickly grow so fast, that the differences would hardly be noticable. So the min and max will be taken from another selectable timeframe. Default would be the min and max from the last month (4weeks). That too could be changed on the edit-screen.
The bar for "today" would be a composite of the last 24 hours as an estimate for the current day, and the actual number of served pages since midnight.
Image 1
There is not much to be set on the settings screen, except for the two timeframes that the widget relies on.
Image 2
Issues:
• on "todays" bar the bar for the actually served pages might not show up for quite a while since the number would be below the minimum number of pageviews per day for the relating timeframe.
Hope to hear your thoughts on this.
Will try to come up with a version that's smaller in size.
I assumed to be this about half the width avaiable on the dashboard.
Jan
P.S. can't use IMG Tags, if someone with the right permissions could change the input format for this post. [Edit: done. -cwgordon7]
#9
There's a patch for tracking statistics over time here #142668: Retain historical node_counter information.
#10
So here's the "mini-widget"
It can be very small and provides just the most basic information.
The widget displays the the numer of pages served over the last 24 hours and relates them to the most and least amount of pages served ever.
Since these values are relative and do change, the absolute values are also printed out.
P.S. Can't use IMG Tags, if someone with the right permissions could change the input format for this post.
#11
I like how simple and effective Edicy does it http://www.edicy.com/blog/see-your-site-traffic-in-edicy
#12
Two thoughts on that
That's why I tried to have relative min/max values for the graphs. So that they would show the current state in relation to something more meaningfull, like last months traffic.
For the simple version I chose lifetime, but that is debatable. For that one I didn't want to have an extra options page.
It looks great though. The images above are like blueprints of an architect. I kept them simple so that we could first argue about what's in it before we get to the point where we argue about dropshadows and colors.
#13
I'm not sure, but as far as I know this also is a new feature because as it current state, drupal does not count site traffic at all. Right?
And if it is going to do that, what would it count? (unique visits, incl. or excl. search bots, the administrator(s)???)
#14
I think it would count the pages drupal rendered/served. That is something drupal already knows something about. A patch that would retain historical data is in the works.
My intention was to keep it reasonably simple. A contrib widget that would integrate with Google-Analytics for example, would be able to offer some more accurate data.
#15
tag
#16
@Jan Krummrey In regards to a Contrib module, the Google Analytics API Module is a reasonably new project created for Google Summer of Code. It allows stats from Google Analytics to be pulled back into Drupal.
#17
Sub.
#18
I think the main problem for this is core statistics module does not provide 'historical' traffic data. Until #142668: Retain historical node_counter information is fixed (not likely for D7 at this point), this is not going to be possible from core. As such, I'm marking this as postponed.
#19