Control websites distantly with the Drupal Remote Dashboard module (DRD)
Drupal is a truly powerful CMF that has tools already built for your website’s SEO, security, performance and anything else you can imagine. One of the superpowers it can give you is the ability to control your websites at a distance. To do this, you can use the DRD, or Drupal Remote Dashboard module. Let’s take a closer look at the tool that helps you “see from afar.”
The Drupal Remote Dashboard module and its features
You know the crystal ball that wizards have in fairy-tales to see exactly what is happening in distant kingdoms, behind high mountains, or across the seas? This time, the wizard is you!
The Drupal Remote Dashboard module (DRD) gives you even more than the crystal ball: you can both monitor and manage your sites hosted on remote servers — easily and all at once, irrespective of any deployment or configuration details.
The DRD will provide you with reports about the state of all your remote Drupal core installations, as well as individual domain names. Extensible and highly customizable menus with the status information and actions to perform are something that all website administrators, owners, and developers will appreciate.
This smart assistant identifies websites automatically, collects error logs, runs CRON, executes PHP code, flushes cache, lists new modules and themes, updates translations, and much more.
Your distant website monitoring powers are unlimited, but if you wish to perform lots of actions on a hundred websites, you will need a bit of patience. The actions will get queued on the server, and you will see information about which actions are accomplished, which are in progress and which are waiting for their turn.
Enhanced security
Distance is no obstacle to information protection. So another DRD advantage is the enhanced security of distant communication provided by means of AES encryption.
The DRD and Drupal versions
The DRD module’s maintainers say that the Drupal 7 version of the module is supported, but is not getting any new functionality, so they advise everyone to migrate to the 8th version.
In addition, they recommend patching the Drupal core, because only by starting with the Drupal 8.2 subversion will you be provided with all the necessary plugins.
As far as remote websites are concerned, any versions (Drupal 8, 7 or 6) are supported.
The DRD Agent to work together with the DRD Dashboard
On all websites you wish to monitor, it is necessary to first install the DRD Agent module. It has now comes to replace the Drupal Remote Dashboard Server module which will still be maintained all the time until all sites move to the DRD Agent. After installing it, you can easily add your remote websites to your DRD Dashboard.
Other modules to work together with the Remote Dashboard include the Entity views attachment, the Key value field, and the Views merge rows. The maintainers also recommend the Queue UI.
Have more control at your fingertips, and Drudesk will help you achieve it! Our developers are ready to assist you in installing and configuring the Drupal Remote Dashboard (DRD) module or any other module that exists. As for the modules that do not yet exist, we can create them for you. Our remote team of helpers and supporters is really close — just click here.