In our line of work, we often deal with many different websites. One of my clients, Vardot, is responsible for over 100 websites. To ensure each site is running smoothly, they needed a tool to keep track of all of them in one place, and hired me to build a "Drupal Support Dashboard", or DSD.
At first, we built out a solution for sending data using Site Audit module. We created an entity and a way to send it from one site to another with the Site Audit Send and Site Audit Server modules. You can read our blog post on Site Audit 4 for more information on how that was done.
After using Site Audit Reports for a bit, it became clear we needed something more. The data about your site was there, but it wasn't accessible in a way that we could build a UI to view individual properties like PHP version or Last Cron Run. There was no useful data about the sites themselves.
While getting some air during DrupalCon Pittsburgh 2023, I came to the realization that we needed a full-fledged Site entity.
What resulted is a new module that provides a Drupal entity to represent a Drupal site, with all of the power Drupal Entities provide.
Now, we that we had site entities, we could add State to show the overall state of the site. We added SitePropery plugins to save data like Drupal and PHP versions. We have revisions, providing a history of the site, able to track individual configuration changes.
Lastly, we created Site Manager module for receiving and displaying this data, and providing a content management experience for your websites.
Site Module & Site Manager Training
This system does a lot of things and has a lot of use cases. We are going to have many different posts about it moving forward.
The best way to learn about Site Module right now is to check out the presentation given at DrupalGovCon 2023. It is linked from the Drupal.org project page: https://drupal.org/project/site
Now Available: Site Module 2.2-RC1
Site.module and Site Manager is ready for testing. Visit https://drupal.org/project/site for more information.
Want to know more?
Do you have a lot of Drupal websites to manage?
Get in touch with us to discuss how you can use site.module to monitor the quality of your Drupal sites.