| eKstreme.com PHPCounter VII | ||
Back to the index page.
Thank you for downloading PHPCounter 7!
PHPCounter 7 is a real time website counter that can track an unlimited number of pages using a single script. The only requirement for using PHPCounter is that your webserver supports PHP. PHPCounter does not use any database, as all information is stored in text files.
PHPCounter has evolved through previous versions to become a complete real-time logging and analysis tool. It allows a webmaster to view statistics about the tracked pages using different 'plugins'. PHPCounter is written in such a way that you can write your custom plugins to analyse the data as you wish!
PHPCounter comes with a set of 'Core Plugins' that give a thorough analysis in their own right. You can view all hits, the last 10 hits, see which browsers and operating systems your visitors use and more! If you have any suggestions for plugins, please contact me (details below).
PHPCounter has several important features, including:
The lastest version of PHPCounter can always be found at http://ekstreme.com/phplabs/phpcounter.php. Please make sure you are using the latest version as it will contain the latest fixes and features.
Note: If you are upgrading from PHPCounter 5.x or 6.x, please see the notes below.
PHPCounter is very easy to install. The first thing you need to do is to download the ZIP file as per the instructions above.
Next, create a folder (also called a directory) on your webserver to store PHPCounter. For the sake of this example, I will call this directory the COUNTER directory.
Next, unzip the PHPCounter ZIP file to a folder on your computer. You will get a list of files. You will also get a two folders (directories) called plugins and images.
Upload ALL OF THE FILES AND FOLDERS to your COUNTER directory on your server.
Open your browser, and browse to your COUNTER directory. For example, if your website is http://ekstreme.com, and your COUNTER directory is /counter, then browse (type in the URL) to http://ekstreme.com/counter/install.php. Follow the installation wizard's instructions. That's it!
The Filter Plugin is a very powerful tool that allows you to view your log data in a customised way.
You do this by setting 'filters'. You can set a filter for each of the pieces of information that PHPCounter stores. They do NOT need to be exact matches; they can be partial strings.
We will now look at some examples to show you what you can do the Filter Plugin.
Suppose you want to know how many visitors you got during December 2003. Go to the Filter Plugin, and type in the 'Date Filter' the following: dec-2003. This will find all hits that occured during December 2003.
[Note: For this to work properly, your log file needs to be longer than the month of December. Otherwise, you will only get a partial list of the December hits.]
How many visitors did you get on April 1st?
In the Date Filter, type in 01-apr-2003.
Let us take a more interesting example. Suppose you want to find out how many visitors came to your website today by clicking on a link on another web page.
For this, we are going to use two filters at the same time. For the sake of this example, suppose that the refereing web page's URL is http://ekstreme.com/phplabs/phpcounter.php, and that today is January 2, 2005. In the Referer Filter, type in http://ekstreme.com/phplabs/phpcounter.php, and in the Date Filter, type in 02-jan-2005. Click on the Filter button to see the hits!
Suppose you have a Mac-specific page; for example, it is the download page of a Mac-only program. How many visitors that visit this page are using Windows?
Again we have to use two filters; suppose that the Mac-specific page's URL is http://ekstreme.com/mac.php. In the Actual URL Filter, type in /mac.php, and in the User-agent Filter, type in Windows. It would be useful if you compare this to the number of Mac users visiting the page: Instead of searching for Windows, search for Mac in the User-agent Filter.