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Plugin brainstorming: hit logging
(Mods: If I placed this in the wrong forum, feel free to move this appropriately.)
I recently came across the problem of having to list the most popular (most visited) articles on a TxP site. While jas_popular_articles is pretty good for just listing them, I have two issues with this plugin’s approach:
(Disclaimer: Nothing personal against the author of the said plugin. This is just a case of needing the right tool for the right job.)
- First it doesn’t support forms and a lot of other nifty things you could put into the form of attributes. Obviously I could just hack the plugin itself and offer a solution but then I go on to my next problem…
- It uses the Textpattern logs. No, it’s not a problem of the plugin as much as it is a problem with TxP hit logging. TxP logs hits by saving the URL requested and not the actual page visited. While it’s true that we can just test the 5 possible URL formats (messy, /id/title, /section/id/title, etc) of an article against the logs, wouldn’t it be better if the log would record the article itself?
I’m still thinking this through. I’m thinking that I’d either have to add a “hits” field to the textpattern table or create a whole new table for article hits. Then I’d create a replacement for <txp:article /> that would increment the hit-count of the article when accessed.
Am I overanalyzing? TooMuchMagic? Should I just use jas_popular_articles and hack it to my needs (and return my mods to the community)? Or am I actually thinking like a sane man and just do this?
Would anyone find this helpful? Any comments or suggestions?
I’d appreciate your feedback. :-)
Last edited by bit (2006-07-27 15:53:39)
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