One of the big goals of the drupal.org redesign is to make it easier for end users to find the right modules for the site they're trying to build. With over 5,000 contributed modules, many of them providing similar functionality, it can be extremely difficult to choose. One method is to try to assess the "health" of the module, by how actively it's maintained, used, supported, etc.

One approach to gauging health is posted at Project ratings and reviews for drupal.org redesign. While that proposal deals with subjective factors, this post addresses objective facts about a module that can be computed and displayed for all projects hosted on drupal.org. While no single metric can tell you what module to use, and some knowledge will be required to make the best use of this data, it's important to make these statistics more readily available on drupal.org to empower users to make better decisions.

The redesign prototype for project pages includes the introduction of a sparkline showing the "Activity" for each project. The details of this activity chart weren't specified at a technical level during the design phase, but the spirit of the design is that they wanted more ways to visualize the health of a project. As we're implementing the redesign, we've been empowered to provide as many charts containing specific data we think will best help end users make sense of what's going on with a project. Read on for our specific proposal, including what metrics to compute, and some ideas on how those are going to be visualized on the new drupal.org