While planning site architecture with a large amount of materials, web developers often face such issue: how to implement a flexible materials sorting, or how to make the most interesting articles not to be lost among the new content?
Here we will describe the solution we have implemented while handling this kind of task.
Let’s suppose that we have a blog with interesting and informative articles. Users read them, leave comments and vote (let voting functionality be implemented by Fivestar module). There is a need to show the blog posts in such a manner that a new content is in the top but at the same time the most popular materials should not be lost at the bottom. For this case Radioactivity module is a perfect solution. It has an abstract value called "Energy", with the help of which the order of the materials is determined. Basically, the module allows you to configure the increase and decrease of energy when materials have either been viewed or not. And thanks to the built-in integration with Rules module, it is possible to expand the rules of the energy impact.
So after its installation the module can be configured at admin/structure/radioactivity: