Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind
Quite a few people are coming here from Joe Newing’s site looking for information and downloads for the wpStats Wordpress plugin. Joe has handed over development to me, and hopefully I will be able to find time in between my other commitments to do some further work on wpStats.
In the meantime, you can download the plugin here. The latest version is 2.11; I hope to post the changelog and other information that appeared on binslashbash.org soon. In the next few weeks I will aim to release 2.12 which will contain updated bot signatures, and further in the future 2.2 which will introduce some new features.
If there’s anything you’d like to see in wpStats please let me know — posting comments here is a good start. Let me know what you think.
Comment
@BigglesZX: I ended up doing exactly what you suggested, but an admin routine with IP management would be a great feature.
I also took a peak beneath the surface of wpStatsInstaller.php to see what was going on during activation. I see now that before table creation, wpStats is doing a check to see if the tables already exist, but there is a flaw in this routine involving the drop statement for the statscountry table. Upon deactivation and reactivation, the plugin tries to recreate the already existing statscountry without dropping it first… It this just on my installation or can anyone else confirm?
Exclusion of certain IPs should happen in the calling code — the part that’s placed in the header of all pages. Until I have a chance to write a proper routine, all you would really need to do is something like…
if ($_SERVER['REMOTE_HOST'] != "(your excluded IP)") {$wS = &new wpStats($_SERVER);
}
I haven’t checked that but it should be fine. At some point (no idea yet when I’m afraid, busy schedule at the moment) I will write that into a proper routine.
btw… a good idea would be to do some existing database detection upon activation of the plugin. when i deactivated this plugin to test the FireStats pluggin (which javascript and filesystem spewed errors all over the place during it’s use btw) and then reactivated it afterwards, the database creation scripts tried to run causing the activation of the plugin to “fail” but not really; meaning, i got a timeout during the activation process and a whole lot of database row errors displayed on the page, but it works fine since everything was already in place from the first/previous activation…
@BigglesZX: no worries, you might wanna remove the first comment i left [the one caught in moderation] since my second (actually third) one is [more] correct… and while I’m at it, I have a question for you: where does value of the wpStats_IPS row in the wp_options database table come into play with this plugin? I notice that it contains two local IP’s (127.0.0.1 & 192.168.1.1). My reason behind asking: I’m looking for a way to exclude IP’s from being logged — and playing with these settings didn’t work; so what do they do? I guess I could explore the plugin code, but if you know off-top, that’ll save me useless time. :)
@digitaljhelms: sorry about the lost comment, it was caught in moderation and I have been away from my computer for the last couple of days.
@johnpoz: Hmm, the blog didn’t catch my first comment, I figured it was in moderation or something but the second one showed up fine. Here’s a recap of what my first comment said that addresses how to fix the GMT issue. You need to open wpDisplayStats.php from the /wp-content/plugins/wpStats/includes/ directory of your Wordpress installation and do a search & replace for all occurances of gmdate and change them to date. Then, address what my first post said and you should be aiight.
@johnpoz: Ooh, forgot that you might also want to change the part in line 514 of the same file that reads gmdate(“h:i:sa \G\M\T, F d, Y”) to date(“h:i:sa, F d, Y”)
@johnpoz: I didn’t like this either, so I fixed it. Open wpStatsDisplay.php in the /wp-content/plugins/wpStats/includes/ folder, go to line 506 and change the function call gmdate to date. Here’s the supporting PHP doc in case you’re interested: http://us3.php.net/gmdate
Thanks for taking over development of this plugin. I just installed it and it looks great. I wonder if you could incorporate an option to show local time? GMT is not nearly as useful to me as being able to select my time zone.
Also, if it would be possible to have a little sidebar widget that allows you to display a few of the pertinent stats publicly that would be awesome! :-)
Thanks,
John
[…] And of course, I’ve enabled the wpStats plugin, which logs stats (from today on) for my visitors, etc. Publically available stats are located on my stats page. […]
Hey Laudro, did you include the calling code in your Wordpress header file? That’s the section that causes a hit to be logged whenever one of your Wordpress pages is requested. Congratulations on being the first commenter on this site :).
I get all zero tallies in my install… Any advice?