Abandonment Notice: I'm afraid I simply don't have the time to maintain my Grav themes and plugins. Those interested in taking over should refer to the "Abandoned Resource Protocol". Feel free to fork and replace. So long, and thanks for all the fish.
The Count Views Plugin is for Grav CMS. It's a simple and naive page view counter.
Installing the Count Views plugin can be done in one of two ways. The GPM (Grav Package Manager) installation method enables you to quickly and easily install the plugin with a simple terminal command, while the manual method enables you to do so via a zip file.
The simplest way to install this plugin is via the Grav Package Manager (GPM) through your system's terminal (also called the command line). From the root of your Grav install type:
bin/gpm install count-viewsThis will install the Count Views plugin into your /user/plugins directory within Grav. Its files can be found under /your/site/grav/user/plugins/count-views.
To install this plugin, just download the zip version of this repository and unzip it under /your/site/grav/user/plugins. Then, rename the folder to count-views. You can find these files on GitHub or via GetGrav.org.
You should now have all the plugin files under
/your/site/grav/user/plugins/count-viewsNOTE: This plugin is a modular component for Grav which requires Grav and the Error and Problems plugins to operate.
Before configuring this plugin, you should copy the user/plugins/count-views/count-views.yaml to user/config/plugins/count-views.yaml and only edit that copy.
Here is the default configuration and an explanation of available options:
enabled: true
datafile: count-views.yamlThe enabled field lets you turn the plugin off and on.
datafile is the path and name of the file that contains the count data, relative to user/data.
This is a simple, naive page view counter. Whenever the Grav system produces a page (cached or not), the route is stored and the count incremented. Obviously if you have a front-end cache that delivers the page without invoking index.php, then the view won't be counted. You also can't filter out views by IP or user (though pull requests are always welcome).
The full view count data is dumped as an associative array (i.e., route => count) into the Twig variable viewcounts. So to get the counts associated with a specific route, use the following code:
{{ viewcounts[page.route] }}
To get a list of, say, the top 10 routes, you could use the following code:
{% for route,views in viewcounts|sort|reverse|slice(0,10) %}
Also, this was one of my first plugins, before I understood the problem PHP had with hyphens in names. To use this plugin with dot notation, you need to do it as follows: {% if config.plugins['count-views'].enabled %}.
Obviously there is a hit because the plugin has to access a physical file on the drive. In my personal experience, I haven't noticed any meaningful difference. Any suggestions to improve performance would be warmly welcomed.