With DrupalCon right around the corner my world is barely organized chaos; but now that we're starting to see some of the things we've been assembling come together the excitement is setting in. What can I say, there's nothing better than building awesome stuff--even if I end up working till 2AM for a few weeks. There's so much coming down the pike that I'm not going to talk about it all here (I'm going to wrangle some of my guys into blogging about this stuff as well), even though I'm busting at the seams to spill the beans on some of the cool things.
I don't want to steal the thunder from some other blog posts that are winging your way, so I'll limit this one to Insight.
Something that has been waiting in the wings for this product has been more detailed scoring on modules. While we've done some cool stuff with modules (like showing you if they've been altered and what the diff of that alteration is) we haven't told you the obvious: are they up to date? Well you'll have that in a few days. Caution: your scores may dip.
The modules page now allows you to do some filtering, and one of those filters is modules that need updating. From there you can see if the updates contain new features, bug fixes, or security updates. You can also see how many versions you are behind so that you can be shamed in to getting up to date. Well, not too much shame, we all fall behind from time to time--that's why Insight is there to help you keep an eye on all your sites.
One of the ways you're going to know that you've a bit of work to do is that if your modules aren't pretty darn close to the latest versions you're going to see your Insight score dip. There are 3 different metrics that come into play. The first is the percentage of modules that are out of date. We don't get too upset if its less than 10%, but as the ratio gets higher we will start to lower the score more and more. Next up is forkedness (oh yeah, I'm making that a word). If your site has more than 5% of its modules altered we start to lower your score. Lastly we look at how many modules need security updates.
In one of my test sites we saw the Insight score drop from 89% to 26%. Gird your loins.
Next up we are bringing in some pretty sweet filtering to our site listing pages. If you have just one subscription you'll not have seen this as we send you right to your dashboard (or the cloud workflow page depending on your products/config) but for folks that have a lot of subscriptions you probably find the page a bit of a pain to navigate. I know I do.
When we launched Insight we started to gain knowledge of the sites on a subscription; dev, stage, prod, qa, all of it. That can make for a pretty long page filled with a lot of cruft. Between production subscriptions, some test ones and a lot of misc stuff my page shows me forty-two subscriptions and hundreds of sites. That means the ones that start with P or S are a fair scroll down the page.
Enter filtering. Starting next week folks with more than just a couple of subscriptions will be able to filter by a variety of parameters such as: connected (with the Acquia Connector), number of sites, number of critical alerts, subscription names, and several other factors. You can create you own filters and use AND/OR to join different parameters. For example you could make a filter that shows subscriptions with Foo in the name, have more than 2 connected sites, are not expired, and have more than 2 critical Insight alerts. Take control of that big ole list.
Also, if you have had a lot of sites that are connected to a subscription 'phone home' and your site list is getting cluttered you'll gain the ability to archive those old sites. Less clutter and filtering to clean things up. Its going to make that page a lot more usable.
But wait, there's more!
While subscriptions are all fine and well from a product standpoint, what we all really care about are the actual sites. You'll soon be able to view your sites without the artificial wrappers of subscriptions. What this means is you could also then have a filter just show you production websites with critical Insight alerts.
Bam! Like Phineas and Ferb you know what you're going to do today!
