[development] Community Analytics Package

Ken Winters kwinters at coalmarch.com
Wed Apr 28 14:53:15 UTC 2010

I'm going to be writing an OG analytics package for a medium sized non- 
profit and
contributing it back to the community, and would like some guidance on  

First, some background.  The site traffic is almost entirely OG-based  
and requires
a login to access.  There are a few dozen public pages as well. Other  
than a lot of
custom content types, the OG install is similar to GDO.  The site is  
currently D5, with
plans to upgrade to D7 in the fall (yes, I realize D5 is going to be a  
lot of extra work).

The goal priorities are (in descending order of importance):

* Capable of providing the needed metrics
* Quality reports and graphing
* Expandable with later module integrations (not just OG)
* Scalable
* Reasonably installable
* Compatible with shared hosting (requiring SSH access is probably fine)

Metrics desired:

* Session length
* Nodes viewed (aggregated by content type)
* Searches made (query and number of results returned)
* Eventually also taxonomy integration

Each would be stored with uids, and each Group would provide an  
aggregate total
based on group membership.

In addition to data collection and processing, I'm also going to need  
a reporting
framework that will provide results as HTML and CSV export of table  
results (one
day resolution).

There have been many posts on the subject, but nothing that provides  
an obvious
starting point:

* http://groups.drupal.org/node/20452
* http://groups.drupal.org/node/20889
* http://groups.drupal.org/node/21563
* http://drupal.org/project/nagios

The underlying technologies I've seen thrown around are Google  
Analytics, Cacti,
Munin, RRDtool, and Nagios.  Open source is desirable but not at the  
expense of
critical features.

If anyone can provide guidance about approaches or eliminate some of the
technologies, it would be greatly appreciated.  I want to avoid a  
solution that is
great for a small number of people but won't ever reach wide adoption.



Ken Winters
Coalmarch Productions LLC

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