Description
Saves view counts from Jetpack Site Stats module as post meta data. This can be useful for displaying view counts in your theme and building custom queries.
What makes this a better solution over other view-tracking plugins is that it simply pulls the information from Jetpack, which is popular and provides fairly accurate data, so this has very little overhead. It’s a streamlined plugin that piggybacks off another which you might already be using.
Comes with a shortcode to display views and a filter to change the post meta key where views are saved.
Thank you to Milan Dinić for improvements in the code after the initial release (and for the Serbian translation)!
Screenshots
Installation
- Upload
wp-stats-view-counter
to the/wp-content/plugins/
directory. - Activate the plugin through the Plugins menu in WordPress.
- Go to Settings > View Counter to select post types to track.
- Use shortcode
[view-count]
orget_post_meta( $post->ID, 'views', true );
to display views.
FAQ
- Which post meta key is used?
-
By default
views
is the key where the view counts are saved, but you can filter this with the filterview_counter_meta_key
. So for example, if you wanted to change the meta key fromviews
tomy-key
, you would use this in your functions.php file:add_filter( 'view_counter_meta_key', 'my_view_counter_meta_key', 10, 1 ); function my_view_counter_meta_key( $key ) { return 'my-key'; }
The plugin will check to make sure the new view count is greater than the old one before replacing, so there is some fallback to prevent it from overwriting previously saved views from other plugins also using the
views
post meta key. - How do I display the views?
-
Either using
get_post_meta( $post->ID, 'views', true );
or the shortcode[view-count]
.The shortcode can also accept before and after parameters, like so:
[view-count before="Views: "] [view-count after=" views"]
And keep in mind that shortcodes can be activated using do_shortcode() if you have having troubled getting it to work:
echo do_shortcode( '[view-count]' );
- How often does it update the views?
-
Every 3 hours an entry is accessed, the plugin will check the WordPress.com Stats view count and update locally. The delay is to ensure we don’t overload the WordPress.com Stats API.
This will be unnoticeable to the average visitor because it’s unlikely they are sitting on your site waiting for the views to update, like you might be.
Unless you have an extremely active site, there isn’t really much reason for the check to be more frequent.
- Can I change the update time?
-
Yes, if you really want to, you can! Use the following filter:
add_filter( 'view_counter_transient_expiration', 'my_view_counter_transient_expiration', 10, 1 ); function my_view_counter_transient_expiration( $hours ) { return 2; // time in hours }
Reviews
Contributors & Developers
“WordPress Stats View Counter” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
ContributorsTranslate “WordPress Stats View Counter” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
Version 1.3
- Better handling on 404 pages
- Minor improvements to code
- Added more instructions about shortcode to readme
Version 1.2
- Serbian translation thanks to Milan Dinić!
Version 1.1
- Thank you to Milan Dinić for all the improvements in this update!
- Makes expiration time filterable, also makes sure that filter returns positive integer.
- Changes one wrong text domain.
- Wraps two strings with i18n function.
- Uses number_format_i18n instead of number_format so that numbers are formatted for languages other than English too. Also makes sure that value passed to it is float since otherwise number_format will return error.
- Pinking shears.
Version 1.0
- This is version 1.0. Everything’s new!