Comparison of Dashboard modules

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Comparison of Administrator Dashboard modules:

  • Total Admin Control - allows creating multiple dashboards (per role or other rules), with support for content, menus, blocks, views, and cck fields and a set of conditions. depends on Chaos Tools and Panels. very complex. solid solution. meant for administrators, but can be adapted for other roles.

Comparison of General Dashboard modules:

  • Spaces Dashboard - provides a Dashboard feature that can be used in spaces types. The Dashboard is intended to be a page, or set of pages, where space administrator have the ability to modify the content and arrangement. Note outside of Open Atrium, Spaces Dashboard requires some theme customization to work properly.

Comparison of Personal Dashboard modules (as in iGoogle):

  • Panels Dashboard - allows creating multiple dashboards (per account), with support for content, menus, blocks, views, and cck fields. depends on Chaos Tools and Panels. very complex. haven't tested yet, still in development. meant for personal use only.
  • Homebox - homebox is currently used on Drupal.org for the 'Your Dashboard' feature. allows creating multiple dashboards (per account), with support for blocks and views blocks. limited extensibility. meant for personal use only.

2016-05-25: The comments below reflect some obsolete modules which have been removed from the lists above.

at this point, without further testing, i see 2 valid routes:
- the complex one, which would use Total Admin Control for administration and Panels Dashboard for personal use.
- the simple one, which would use D6 Managesite / D7 Dashboard (in core) for administration and Homebox for personal use.
OG Panels / User Dashboard would go somewhere in between.

note: the last reviews i did for some of the modules (the case of Homebox for example) might not longer be correct.
It is possible that they are now fully functional.

==== older comments ====

Total Admin Control is by far the most useful of these modules, unless you need per user (customizable) dashboards, like iGoogle.

At this point i wouldn't recommend any other solution.

// EDIT
Most useful for what? Total Admin Control is only for admin dashboards and doesn't work for regular users.

// REPLY
While you can't have per-user customizable Dashboards with Total Admin Control, you can create easily variants (panels) of the dashboard for other roles, specific users or other conditions, ranging from administrative/moderation tasks, to social features, like my blogs, my bookmarks, my friends, heartbeat display, etc...

all you can do with Panels you can do with Total Admin Control Dashboard.

TACD focuses on deploying a dashboard pre-populated at a specific place.
by the same logic one could conclude that Panels is by itself a Dashboard capable module, but it isn't setup that way by default.
TACD creates that setup so you will have less work setting up a Dashboard for admins, but you'll have some work ahead if you want a more general user activity dashboard.

another useful addition to creating a Dashboard, but in this case, alter directly the profile page of each user, is Advanced Profile Kit, which also works with Panels. haven't tested that one yet...
not sure you can combine TACD with APK.

// REPLY
added OG Panels and Panels Dashboard.
these two should fill partially in the gap left by per user dashboards.
it's a good start though :)

// EDIT
added Managesite and rewrote the list