I have been writing Wordpress plugins for a good while now and with the release of Wordpress 2.7, I decided to rewrite the Session Manager to both look better and provide a little more information that the first incarnation.
If you don’t know what my Session Manager is all about then read on, otherwise download Version 2.0
Session Manager V2.0 (12.19 KB)
Wordpress Session Manager is freely available through this site. Feel free to chop and change it to suit your needs (I may even help if you ask). It gives you the following information:
- The number of visitors in the last day (configurable) (v1.0)
- The number of pages each visitor looked at (v1.0)
- Which pages have been looked at (v1.0)
- The times each page was visited (v1.0)
- The visitor count displayed per page (v1.1)
- Recent site activity (2.0)
- Wordpress 2.7 support and restructure (v2.0)
- Support for user excludes by session_id, user_id or ip address (v2.0)
- Support for page excludes (v2.0)
- Delete data functionality (v2.0)
That’s it, no more, no less!
I find that a lot of stats plugins give a little too much information and in doing so making both the stats harder to read and analyse. Session Manager differs because what it provides is a very light weight logging implementation with a simple yet effective front end allowing you to view the data in a number of ways.
I have been using it on this site and newmedias.co.uk since mid 2008 and it has been instrumental in giving me enough data to satisfy that ‘whose looking at my site’ itch while not distracting me too much from what I was doing in the first place (as other stats plugins like Woopra can do).
Screenshots
View Recent
View By User
View By Page
Home Screen
Downloads through the ages
Version 2.0 Released January 2009: Session Manager V2.0 (12.19 KB)
Version 1.1 Released mid 2008: Session Manager V1.1 (3.84 KB)
Version 1.0 Released mid 2008: Session Manager v1.0 (3.16 KB)
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated and if anyone wants to make something more of it then i would be keen to hear about it and/or help.
What’s the compatibility for WP 2.8.4?
Currently untested but then again it’s a fairly simple plugin so I see no problems with it. It’s pretty raw data and you should ideally be a bit obsessive to use the plugin. My recommendation for prettier statistics with graphs etc is Google Analytics which is very easy to add to your site by way of a line of code in your footer or by using a plugin to do it. there are loads of plugins available to do so. However if you fancy a go at using this plugin then you can always swap to google at a later date if you want more info (or do both at the same time!)
hope this helps
I’m curious as to why you store each hit separately, instead of having a hit counter to save database rows on large websites.
Hi,
Because you can do so much more with the data when it is stored as individual rows. Half of the stats you see would not be possible without storing individual rows. In reality the only thing you can do with a hit number is to output the number. You are unable to split out the robot hits, dates, browsing patterns etc.
MySQL is such a powerful tool that hundreds of thousands of rows should not effect the performance of the site assuming the queries are written efficiently, which they should be I imagine. It has been a while since I wrote the plugin so there may be some small tweaks I could make but please do take the code and improve on it. I would be interested to see what people do with it.
thanks
Sean
Would you know why your plugin would trigger a fatal error on activation without any error messages (even with WP_DEBUG)?
I’m at a loss.
Hi Elizabeth, That’s news to me as it has never happened before nor been reported yet. Can you please let me know what version of session manager you are using and what version of Wordpress. I take it you are using PHP5 because sometimes sites using PHP4 can be fussy about these things?
thanks
Sean