Drupal Core Statistics in Blocks and by Longer Durations
This article was published in the print magazine Drupal Watchdog, Volume 6 Issue 2, , on page 13, by Linux New Media. The magazine was distributed at DrupalCon Dublin, .
While the Statistics module built into Drupal can track and display useful analytics data about visitors to a website, it has some limitations that have been addressed by contributed modules. For instance, by default the data is only available on four report pages, but not in blocks. Also, aggregate node accounts are only for the past three days. The Statistics Blocks module https://www.drupal.org/project/statistics_blocks presents all of that data in blocks, thereby providing more flexibility and allowing for a dashboard page displaying all of the results at once. The Statistics Counter module https://www.drupal.org/project/statistics_counter supplements the three-day totals with those for the last week, month, and year. It is integrated with the Views module, thereby allowing a site builder to customize the data filtering and ordering.
