UpTime Widget Drupal module to show website reliability
There are many beautiful words you can use to tell your customers that your website is trustworthy, reliable, and transparent. But one small widget can say it better that a thousand words.
So let us introduce the UpTime Widget Drupal module. See how it could help you always stay aware of your website uptime, build customer trust, and stand out from competitors.
Module maintained by our developers
Before we move on, we are especially happy to mention that the UpTime Widget Drupal module is maintained by our guys.
Knyshuk.vova is the owner of the module. Its creator Lolandese transferred the ownership to him in accordance with Open Ownership Pledge. Vladimirrem and ApacheEx are maintainers of the module who also make important commits.
These are Drupal developers from Drudesk and Drudesk’s parent company — InternetDevels, which is also listed as supporting organization on the module’s page.
What UpTime Widget Drupal module does
The UpTime Widget module connects your website to the popular free uptime monitoring service — UpTimeRobot.com.
It shows your website uptime (the percentage of time that your website is available to visitors online). Ideally, it should be 100%, although this figure may be a little bit lower in reality.
Your website uptime figure appears in the form of a handy widget to be placed anywhere on your website as a Drupal block. It can also optionally show a configurable copyright notice.
The UpTimeRobot service is able to monitor your website uptime every 5 minutes or at an interval you choose. You can get notifications about it by:
- SMS
- RSS
- push notifications for iPhone or iPad.
How the UpTime Widget module works in more detail
Getting your keys on the UptimeRobot service
First, we will need to register our website from the UptimeRobot.com service and get the API key and the monitor ID. We need to make a few easy steps:
- sign up, activate your account, and log in at UptimeRobot.com
- add a new monitor of the HTTP(s) type, give our website a name, and submit its URL
- go to “My Settings”, create the main API key (in the right bottom corner), and copy it to clipboard
- go to http://api.uptimerobot.com/getMonitors?apiKey=FILL-IN-YOUR-API-KEY-HERE and paste the API key instead of the last part of the URL
- refresh the page and see the monitor ID generated (monitor id = “a few digits here”).
The UptimeRobot service has plenty of interesting things like informative dashboards or detailed notification settings. We can come back here any time, but now let’s grab the API key and monitor ID and move on to our Drupal 8 website.
Installing and configuring the UpTime Widget module
The UpTime Widget module can be installed on the Drupal 8 website in any way you prefer. Although it is using a third-party service, installation with Composer is not obligatory.
When the module is installed and enabled, its settings appear at admin/config/system/uptime_widget. Let’s run through some of them.
- There are two key required fields where we need to enter the previously received API key and monitor ID.
- The “decimal separator” and “scale” fields have nice defaults, but we can play with the ways our website uptime digits are displayed.
- The monitoring interval and the refresh interval fields also have sensible defaults. But we can choose how often the website uptime should be checked and how often Drupal should receive this information.
Configuring the copyright notice
The website uptime widget by default comes with the copyright widget, which can optionally be disabled. Hiding or showing the copyright is also available in the block configuration, which will be described in the “Configuring the Uptime block” part.
The module’s settings page at admin/config/system/uptime_widget lets us configure how the copyright will look. It offers:
- several options for the copyright notice
- the option to specify the year that our domain was first online
- the option to write a custom “Prepend text” instead of “All rights reserved.”
Placing and configuring the Uptime block on the website
It’s now time to place the uptime widget block on our Drupal website. In Structure — Block Layout, we choose the theme region (for example, Footer first), click on it, find the Uptime block in the list of blocks, place block, and save the blocks.
We can configure the block to our liking — either on the Block Layout page or by clicking the “quick edit” pencil near the block on the website.
We can leave or hide its title by checking or unchecking “Display title,” configure visibility for specific roles, specific pages or content types, and so on.
We can also choose to show both the uptime and copyright widgets, or only one of them.
More features to come in the future
Our guys have many plans about the module’s improvements in version 8.2. Here are at least some of them:
- Uptime check notifications should be configurable directly from the Drupal website, which is for now only possible on the UpTimeRobot service.
- The Uptime information should be included into the “Reports” page on the Drupal dashboard.
- Public Status Pages, or detailed boards about uptime information, should be integrated into Drupal.
Get yourself a website uptime widget
Show your visitors they can rely on you all the time! And you can always rely on our Drupal support team if you need any help in:
- installing and configuring the UpTime Widget Drupal module
- customizing its look on your website
- creating another custom Drupal module in accordance with the customer’s requirements
Stay reliable and build your customer trust!