Radioactivity

Publish your module code – It's the best thing for you and your customer

Back in 2007, my former employer and a current Mearra customer, Uusi Suomi, needed a way to measure and show what's hot and popular on their news site. We initially used Drupal's built-in node counter to list nodes ordered by daily page views. That worked for a while until we noticed the apparent weaknesses: 1) the counter gets reset once a day making near random content the most popular during the slow hours after midnight, and 2) the system favors content published near the reset time as the list feeds itself; people want to read content that other people have found interesting.

Radioactivity 2: basics

With Radioactivity 2 nearly out of its beta form, I thought I'd write a bit about what it is and what you can do with it and most importantly walk you through on how to use it. Radioactivity 2 allows you to track any fieldable entities; users, nodes, commerce products, etc. It can be used as a simple view counter but also as a popularity or activity meter, e.g. with it you can create a 'most viewed nodes at this moment' list. There is also limited rules which allows you to create an activity meter for basically whatever you want.