Drupal Modules

It does what it says it will do.... but it has major issues in the long run.

This is the first review I am writing for a Drupal Module. It is really the first time that I felt I needed to. Activity stream does exactly what it says it will do. It was easy to setup. No errors. Simple to get working. The documentation was easy to understand and the features work well....

Now for the bad part. This module uses nodes for storing activities. This means that every activity that is being promoted through the stream, is created as a piece of content or node. This means that when you have a user that uses all of the streams available, every time they do something in the stream, a new piece of content is created. If a user was to do 20 things in a day, then 20 new content nodes are created. This all works well in theory, except....

This is a major problem. This module could only be used on small blog or personal sites. If you were to run this on a community with hundreds or thousands of members, your database would grow astronomically. 1 person averaging 20 things a day * 1,000 users would be 20,000 nodes created per day for your site. 20k * 365 is over 7 million nodes created for activity in a year. This is way to much. Most sites wont even have 1 million nodes created in a year of real content. If you were on a shared server, you would quickly run out of space for your community. Content nodes should be related to content. If you install the twitter module, it doesnt create a piece of content for every tweet that is imported into the site. There should be a feature to clear the activity stream so that the database entries do not get too high in volume, but that feature is not developed.

It does what it says, just not the way you want it to.

Review by UnitedVision [info] on October 13, 2009 - 21:51