Outstanding! Can't wait to get this set up and dive into it a bit.

I get an error when I insert into my template and try to save it. It doesn't say what error it is.. it just shows the yellow rectangle without any message inside of it.

Love it :-) This is just the thing that authors want to see when they plunge in to produce yet another carefully written article. I'll be on the lookout for the pro. Sounds great!

Ok, nevermind that last post.. I solved it.

My recomendation for the pro version is that (combined with AJAX Ratings Pro) you easily be able to generate the code to be able to build popular post boxes like those at the bottom of the page at PopSugar.com (and sites like MSNBC and Yahoo! News) which would allow you to show tabs for most popular (AJAX Ratings) and most read (Vistor Stats) in addition to most recent and most commented.

Ahhh one of those plugins I didn't know I wanted :)

This is great. I can see you've been working hard the last couple of days.

Nice work.

I'm looking forward to the Pro version very much, particularly the per-author stats.

Small little note for post step 3: After the Install Visitor Templates item completes, you will see a template in front of you. Make sure you click publish, as this is not automatically published in the Install Visitor Templates item. If you forget this step, your Publish (rebuild) all files will not finish.

So far looks like a great plugin! Thanks for the effort!

Brian R.,

Actually, that template does get published (rebuilt) automatically -- so this extra step is not needed. You won't see any messages to this effect, but the template does get automatically published (behind the scenes) as part of the plugin's template installer routine.

Trying to rebuild a blog that uses Visitor Stats with the command line rebuild plugin results in bunch of these error messages:

Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /mt/lib/MT/Builder.pm line 387.
Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /mt/plugins/VisitorStats/VisitorStats.pl line 78.

msaari, that sound like a 'warning' and not an error. This means that it shoudl nto stop your page from rebuilding and should not cause any problems. Is Visitor Stats working after a rebuild in this way?

Sure, everything seems to work as normal. I guess I'll have to figure out a way to suppress the warnings. Thanks!

I'm getting this error.

Fatal error: Smarty error: [in evaluated template line 50]: syntax error: unrecognized tag 'mtvisitorstatstracker' (Smarty_Compiler.class.php, line 580) in /home/asevitz/public_html/webapps/mt/4_0/php/extlib/smarty/libs/Smarty.class.php on line 1095

Does this mean this is not compatible with dynamic publishing?

sevitzdocom, that is correct. The current version of the plugin does not support dynamic publishing .... BUT ... I plan on adding support for dynamic publishing in the next release. Look for it soon.

Thanks Mark,

I was a bit confused because you said it wasn't required, which I thought implied it could be used but wasn't needed.

I'll keep an eye open for updates.

Thanks
Adrian

Adrian, you make a good point. I could have been more clear on that point. What I meant was that "although the plugins uses PHP to record stats, you don't need to enable PHP-dynamic publishing to use the plugin (if you are using static publishing". I should have added that dynamic publishing is not fully supported. ;)

This is nice, but why does it write to mt-static? Hint: static.

Kevin, this plugin leverages the existing "Blog Stats" widget that comes with MT4, and writes stats files to sub-directories of 'mt-static' in the same way as the built-in stats for entries and comments. Every 15 minutes, the 'static' statistics files will be refreshed, and the graphs will be adjusted accordingly.

Has anyone got the 'list visit' link working when you click on a days bar to get the link that appears below the chart? I get an error message when following the link that says "unknown error occurred - Unknown action list_visit". The url in the link is http://somedomain.com/mt/mt.cgi?__mode=list_visit&filter_key=_by_date&blog_id=11&filter_val=20070822-20070822 If it's working for you, did you have to do anything special to get it to work, or was it ok from the start?

dazla, thanks for pointing this out. This link doesn't work currently. In the upcoming Visitor Stats Pro, it will likely display a list of recent visitors with some data about each. I should probably disable the link from the current version.

Hi, I ve stuffed it up a bit and need to remove it...i deleted the template to start again and now when I go to republish it says I need to delete or rename the template, even though it doesn't exist any more...any ideas?

Great plugin--and I'm looking forward to the "Pro" edition's ability to track individual entries. I'm just hoping you won't be adding a hefty price tag on the "Pro" version.

I think one feature that would be great to have is an list of IP addresses or domains from which visits should not be tracked.

Rationale: you will be contributing to the visitor count each time you view your blog to check that the entry was published properly, and that obscures the visitor statistics a bit.

First of all this is a great plug-in!

It appears that the calculated views and visitors doesn't reflect the time zone setting of the MT install.

Great work and looking forward to a PRO version.

Mark, I realize that you may only be at the idea stage of the "pro" version, but could you perhaps indicate whether that will be a paid version, and possibly what the time frame for the development will be?

wolf, thanks for your ideas. And yes, the Pro version will be a paid version only, and I hope to have it released around the middle of September. (If not, it will have to wait until I return from my vacation to Thailand in early October).

hamish, I think the problem is that you need to also delete the Visitor Stats Widget, before your can re-install the templates. Go to Design>Templates and then choose Widgets from the right-side menu, then delete the Visitor Stats widget, then try to reinstall. (Note that in future version of this plugin, template installation will be handled by the Template Installer plugin, which should avoid such problems.)

bloggidy, I will look into that timezone issue, thanks for pointing that out.

This is how I have coded the header template

I have used Widget Manger to add the "Visitor Stats" widget to my sidebar and the stats are counting as pages on the " Stats Counter" sidebar not visits.
In addition it seems I cannot or unable to publish (get a green arrow) on the Visitor Stats Counter widget template. There is just a Save option. I have published all templates sytem wide many times.
Visitor and views are showing correctly on the larger my stats visitors view screen etc
Any help is appreciated

thanks much

joex,

A few things:

-you don't need to add <MTVisitorStatsCounter type="visit"> to your header.

-the widget is a template that gets "included" into other templates -- that's why there is no green arrow.

To change the display of the counter to visits, you need to *edit* the "Visitor Stats Counter" widget. So open the widget and look for the <$MTVisitorStatsCounter$> tag. Then change it to <$MTVisitorStatsCounter type="visit"$>. Then rebuild (publish) all files.

The basic version is really interesting. Now i'm waiting for the pro version! I was thinking of how I could use it for my site and I thought this out: It would be usefull to display each user with entries the would like. According to the entries they have already visited, find related entries (by tag or maybe there's some better way) and display them on a sidebar widget. Something like what Amazon has with other products you would like. I'm not sure how complicated this would be. I guess it would go with the function you already mentioned about showing what entries registered users have already visited and add some "related entry"-type function to it.

Hope the pro version isn't expensive as well! I have a non-commercial site so I can't afford the high prices the pro versions have.. but I still want my site to have those really cool features.

I'm using MT 4.01. I got the plug-in installed, and everything seems to be as expected (shows on dashboard, etc.), except that I can't seem to get the page or visit counter to increment. I inserted MTVisitorStatsTracker just before the /head tag in my header template. Noob question: am I supposed to insert it as "lessthan dollar MTVisitorStatsTracker dollar greaterthan" (with the dollar signs) or "lessthan MTVisitorStatsTracker greaterthan" (without the dollar signs)? I've tried both and neither seem to work, but I'm just wondering.

Any other suggestions?

Thanks.

-tony

tony, it doesn't matter whether you include the dollar signs or not -- it should work either way. Is the problem you are having with the graph on the dashboard not showing any stats, or the <MTVisitorStatsCounter> tag on your published blog, or both? If the latter, make sure you do a rebuild (re-publish) to see if that shows the stats. If both, I would first check to make sure that the tables have been installed correctly. There should be two tables with names starting with mt_visitorstats.

The problem is with both the dashboard and the counter on the blog. I have republished the blog several times as I've tried to troubleshoot the issue, and I'm still coming up with zero's everywhere. I'll follow your advice and have someone with permissions on the server see if the tables have been installed. Stay tuned...

We are still stuck, and running out of ideas. We have uninstalled and reinstalled visitor stats, followed the step by step instructions for tagging and republishing, and are still getting zeroes for all stats. Does anyone have any other ideas? Is stats.php supposed to display something other than a blank page if everything is installed correctly? What would the behavior be if this were a php or mysql problem?

Thanks.

-tony

hey I am having some issues with the plugin. I have followed the instructions, installed the files, place the tracker tag in the header module and republished. And I dont seem to be writing any data to the tables. So I am not seeing any data showing up on the graphs. The webserver user has permissions to those tables, where can I go to see if that module is getting called. I see where stats.php is called, but not your module. Any ideas?

So I have added to the Header module

<MTVisitorStatsTracker>
</head>

I verified that index.hml ( main template ) in including the header module

<$MTInclude module="Header"$>

I have republished the pages of the blog. when I do a view source is this the translated call to the counter?

<script type="text/javascript">
var img = new Image();
if (typeof commenter_id == 'undefined') { var commenter_id = ''; }
img.src = "http://blog.regence.com/cpss/stats.php?u=" + escape(document.location.href) + "&r=" + escape(document.referrer) + "&a=" + commenter_id + "&b=16&t=&i=";
</script>

0
</head>

I dont see any data being written to mt_visitorstats_view or mt_visitorstats_visitor which have the correct permissions for the database user.

Any place else I should be looking to see why my counters are working or writing data?

Mike

Mike, that javascript code looks right. Note that this code is for the "tracker", which actually writes the stats to the database. )The "counter" is a basic template tags that displays the total views or stats).

If nothing is being written to those tables, the issue may lie with the "Visitor Stats" template, which builds the stats.php file listed in the javascript above. First try to rebuild that template, does it work? After that, I would try to open the stats.php file via FTP or a file manager and take a look at the code, especially the top part that deals with database connection information.

I tried to access the subdomain you referenced, but it was not found. Is this just an example, or is this subdomain not live yet? The browser must be able to access that URL so that the stats.php file gets called in order to write to the database.

tony, you may want to try the same things for your problem. The stats.php file, if called directly in the browser, should display a blank page. Do you have an example URL for your site? What versions of php and mysql?

Just installed VisitorStats basic to try it out. When I go to install the templates on my preferences page I get the following error: "Unknown action install_blog_templates"

I also get an error from my cron jobs:

"my" variable $args masks earlier declaration in same scope at /home/jbrisbin/public_html/cgi-bin/mt/plugins/VisitorStats/VisitorStats.pl line 384.

I looked in the VisitorStats.pl file and I see why it's giving that error: first, there's this:

my($ctx, $args) = @_;

Then, later on, this:

my $args = {
group => [
"extract(year from created_on)",
"extract(month from created_on)",
"extract(day from created_on)"
],
};

Did I miss a step somewhere? I haven't even got to the point where I can start collecting stats yet...

J.,

The two problems are unrelated. The first, the "Unknown action install_blog_templates" error is because you don't have the Template Installer plugin installed. This is now required. Click here to get it (free).

The second one is just a warning, and won't prevent the plugin from working. Still, that one has been fixed in development and will be released in a new version soon. As you noted, the second block of code should be $args = { instead of my $args = {.

Thank for the info, Mark! I got TemplateInstaller installed and got VisitorStats up and running.

I also edited the VisitorStats.pl file to remove the warning. Now no email every 10 minutes when my cron job runs! :)

Thanks!

OK, I'm hooked - Pro Version please ;)

Hi Mark,
I have a problem in installation. When I upload the files and login on MT (MT4) it goes to the upgrade database page and then says upgrade complete but when I press want to go back to movable type it gets to a circle, meaning it asks me again to login to do the upgrade again. This thing continues till I delete the visitorstats folder!
I'll be grateful if you help me..
cheers
Ali

Yeah, doesn't work. When I press the "install template" button, I get this error: "Unknown action install_blog_templates." I hope you guys have got a great support page or I'll be asking for my $33 back faster than you can say "broken buggy plug-in."

OK, I've got everything installed, and I've followed the installation instructions to the letter, several times, and still, like Tony and Mike above, I get zero counts for my stats counter (view).

My mt_visitorstats_view & mt_visitorstats_visitor tables exist, they have no data, the stats.php file has the correct mysql login information, the connection information looks right (why would it ever be incorrect unless the plug-in installation is buggy), and my stats.php file, when directly viewed in the browser, does NOT display a blank page -- instead I get this:

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@libertydesirebelief.thechartersofdreams.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

See: http://libertydesirebelief.thechartersofdreams.com/stats.php

So -- what's going on? Why doesn't the plug-in simply work? For a paid "pro" version, I don't want to spend a lot of time googling, digging through help forums, troubleshooting, debugging and hacking to get it to work. Thanks Mark.

Tony or Mike -- have you guys solved the problem?

Charters, thank you for all the details, that helps a lot.

I just tried your stats.php page, and I get a blank page. You described a 500 (Internal Server) error. Have you managed to get everything working? I also see that your stats counter on your home page is now showing some stats, so presumably the database tables now have some data in them.

Please let me know if you continue to experience any problems. I am sure we can work through them and get things working.

Christopher,

The reason that you are seeing the "Unknown action install_blog_templates" error is that you have not installed the required Template Installer plugin. That should fix things faster than you can say... ;)

Anyone coded something to show in the sidebar yet? Top 10 Most poplar articles...Maybe?

Thanks again for a great plugin...

OK... let me say... duh...

I found the widget with this code:

Stats Counter

" />

Powered by Visitor Stats

However it will only render the CSS - no articles. I checked the dashboard.. .it shows recent stats for everything...

Suggestions?

OK, as long as I am hogging up the comments ;)

Still can't get most read to show - but another question... can I use other MT Tags inside of the code - something like this:
[MTMostReadEntries lastn="3"]

[MTEntryCategories include="[$MTCategoryLabel$]"[

[a href="[$MTEntryPermalink$]"][$MTEntryTitle$][/a] ([$MTEntryStats$])
[/MTEntryCategories]
[/MTMostReadEntries]

Hi Jim,

First note that there are 2 blog widgets:

Stats Counter - which displays a counter and small graph, no entries.

and

Most Read Entries - (Available to users of the Pro version, like you) Displays the top rated entries.

To answer your question, you should be able use any MTEntryXXX tags inside the MTMostReadEntries container, although you example above doesn't really make much sense. Remember that everything inside <MTMostReadEntries> and </MTMostReadEntries> will be repeated for every entry in the list. If you goal is to display the most read entries for a specific category, you do this:

<MTMostReadEntries category="books" lastn="10">
<a href="<$MTEntryPermalink$>"><$MTEntryTitle$></a> (<$MTEntryStats$>)
</MTMostReadEntries>

Finally a note on getting Most Read to work properly, please note the following, as mention in the readme.txt file that came with the plugin:

Visitor Stats Pro includes two MT "scheduled tasks" to perform certain functions in an "offline" manner, so as not to negatively affect performance. These tasks are set to run once an hour, at most. MT's scheduled tasks gets triggered 1) when you receive a junk comment or trackback, 2) When you view an xml "activity feed", or 3) when the /tools/run-periodic-tasks script is run via cron job or via the command line. If you don't regularly use activity feeds and your sites get infrequent (or disabled) comments, it is highly recommended that you setup a cron job to execute /tools/run-periodic-tasks at least once per hour. This will also ensure that scheduled (future) entries get published automatically on schedule.

Note that if the scheduled tasks have not run at least once, your Most Read listing will be blank. The quickest way to test this is to:

- Go to System Overview > Activity Log
- Click the Activity Feed link on the right side of the page
- Hit the back button, then refresh the activity log, and check for a log message about scheduled tasks running
- Rebuild your site, and check to see if the Most Read widget is now working.

very good - thanks for the tips. I am setting it up in a test environment with MT4 and haven't set up CRON - should have hit the readme.txt.

Sorry about that - thanks again for a great plugin - looking forward to buying a few more of these that you have.

Hi Mark, Wondering if you could help me with these strange results - I have created 'Most Read' lists for the overall (all categories) as well as 2-3 individual categories. now the most read entry #1 for the overall (all categories) is the #10 entry on one of the category most read listings. How is this possible ? The most read entry overall would b the most popular on the whole blog and consequently #1 in its particular category too. any idea wat would cause this? Have a look at my url , I have pointed it to the page in question.

I am using MTEntries as mentioned in the readme file with the plugin.

Hey Mark,

Yes, I have the same problem described by Charter, Tony, and Mike.

Everything is configured correct, yet the stats.php returns an error and there are no entires in my database.

Any ideas?

bryan, what error are you seeing? Can you provide a link to your site?

I just installed it, but when I try to install the templates, I get the following error:

Undefined subroutine &MT::Plugin::TemplateRefresh::default_dictionary called at /home/.niggs/aaronpowell/aaronrosspowell.com/mt/plugins/TemplateInstaller/TemplateInstaller.pl line 181.

Aaron that error suggests that the TemplateRefresh plugin (that comes with MT) is either missing or disabled. This plugin must be installed and enabled.

Installing VisitorStats Pro broke the plugin for me. When I try to install it, MT says the plugin "Failed to load". Removing and installing again doesn't help. What's worse, the basic version which worked just fine before doesn't work anymore either.

This isn't quite the result I wanted when I bought the Pro version...

Ok, basic version works now. Pro version still says "failed to load" if I try to install it. Any idea what could cause this?

When will this plugin be compatible with dynamic publishing?

Just curious.

When I add the tag before the tag, all the pages on my blog turn blank.

WHen I change the tag to "", that tag appears in the expected place.

I'm using dynamic publishing... I understood from the instructions that "you do not need to enable MT's dynamic publishing feature" means that the plugin works with dynamic publishing, but cruv's comment suggests there's a problem with dynamic publishing.

My page doesn't disappear when I put it into a different blog that doesn't have dynamic publishing enabled, but I don't see the data appearing.

The plugin looks great -- I'd love to see it working.

Woah... I suddenly started to see some data coming in on my static blog, but now when I try to view the data, I get "Unknown action list_view."

A strange problem! I have MTMostReadEntries list on my blog sidebar. After that, I've got bunch of MultiBlog lists as well. For some reason, the MTMostReadEntries changes the context of the MultiBlog MTEntries tags from the other blog to the most read entries list. So, instead of displaying latest titles from my other blogs, my blog sidebar has my most read entries over and over again.

Using MTEntries with sortby="score" and namespace="views" doesn't mess up the other lists, but doesn't display correct results (just the latest entry).

Is there a way to get MTVisitorStatsCounter to show the number of views from the last month, last week, or an arbitrary set date?

I dont wish to ask this, but how do I uninstall this plugin? Cos something happened during the installation of the plugin and now i cant access the setting option.

Hope i can get a solution soon so i can install it again. :)

Great stuff, Mark. However, I've run into a bit of a problem with MT 4.1.

When I try to install FastSearch, I got this error:

I thought that the solution would be to upgrade Visitor Stats. I installed the latest version, and got this error when going through the upgrade process:

Can't locate object method "datasource" via package "VisitorStats::View" at lib/MT/Upgrade.pm line 1270.

Any ideas?

-Mike

Michael, the reason for that error was that the old version of Visitor Stats did not support PHP-dynamic publishing. The new version, released shortly after you posted your comment, includes support for dynamic tags.

I am not sure why you would get the "datasource" error, but if you get it with 1.6, please let me know....

I just got the same error in upgrading:

Can't locate object method "datasource" via package "VisitorStats::View" at lib/MT/Upgrade.pm line 1270.

Very strange. This version should not even trigger an upgrade screen. What version of MT are you using? And what exact version of Visitor Stats were you using prior to the upgrade?

I upgraded to MT 4.1 yesterday from MT 4.01. This installation had Visitor Stats 1.5 installed. I upgraded to Visitor Stats 1.6 today and encountered the problem.

I have a small problem with the plugin:

When I try to install the templates for a blog, I receive the following error: Loading template 'get_template_installer.tmpl' failed.

I'm using MT 4.1. Anyone else had this problem?

arsenie: Thats because you do not have the template installer plugin which is required. Just install that as well and that error will go away :)

I see some people having problems with the stats.php file and unless I missed it, no real solution has been posted.

Here's my stats.php source (with sensitive bits obscurred to protect the innocent).

http://www.flyinglow.ca/flyinglow/debug_stats.txt

This test URL produces an 500 Internal Server error.
http://www.flyinglow.ca/flyinglow/stats.php?u=test_doc&r=&a=&b=1&t=&i=

Any suggestions?

Some more information regarding my problem. It might be the host I'm using, or something in the way Movabletype is installed. Hopefully someone here can help.

The visitor stats feature is not working and I have traced the problem to php scripts not executing in certain folders (namely, those used by the Movabletype application). I'm not sure what is wrong with my setup.

For example, the following WORKS (not part of the blog):
http://www.flyinglow.ca/grounded/gambling/tims.php

and this does NOT work (within the blog folder structure):
http://www.flyinglow.ca/flyinglow/stats.html
(right-click and view source, the

Must not have cut-n-pasted it all...

the stats.html page contains php script to print "hello world" - if you view the page source, you can see the php script! It didn't run.

Thought the word 'stats' might have been throwing the server, so I created a test.php, it returns a 500 Internal Error. The source of http://flyinglow.ca/flyinglow/test.php is:

Sorry for the posting flurry, but wow, Suresupport is FAST. Problem solved. Turns out the various installation files setup incorrect permissions on the server and my host's security settings were protecting me from myself. Here's their response (in less then 10 minutes!!)

Hello,

Regrading the first part of your request, the .html files are static documents. They are not supposed to be parsed by the PHP interpreter. That's why you can see the code.

If you want to instruct the PHP parser to process .html documents, please follow these steps:

1. Create an .htaccess file within the main folder for the hosting account (/www/www)

2. Add this line to it:

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .html .htm

3. Save the file

The 500 server error is caused because the "flyinglow" folder has its permissions set to 777. We changed the permissions to 775 and this removed the error.

Our servers are running SuExec, which is the most secure environment for a shared hosting server. The scripts are run with the user of their owner (your CP user) and not with the user of the web server (apache). Thus, if a script has to be able to write to a file/directory - world-writable permissions (like 777 or 666) are no longer needed. Actually, such permissions are considered as insecure and files with world-writable permissions will not be executed - the result will be "500 Server Error".

If your installation manual says that you should set world-writable permissions to some files/directories, you need to set permissions 775 or 755 instead - and your script will work properly. It is just not presumed that the server may be running a CGI wrapper (such as Suexec).

Let us know if you need any additional assistance or information.

Best Regards,
Support

Hey Mark:

I am in need of Stats by Author / Monthly. I'd be willing to pay again ( a reasonable fee mind you ;>) for this feature.

Thanks for an awesome tool.

Mark,
I am using the Visitor Stats basic 1.62, but it doesn't seem to be recording the visits or views. I can seen the Blog Stats window and for views and visitors it is a flat line. When I click on the adjustment arrow I get an "undefined" message in the bottom of the Stats window. The blog I am using it on is dynamically published.

Also when I try to use the widget in the sidebar I get this:

Fatal error: Smarty error: [in evaluated template line 107]: syntax error: unrecognized tag 'mtvisitorstatstracker' (Smarty_Compiler.class.php, line 580) in /home/michael/public_html/cgi-bin/php/extlib/smarty/libs/Smarty.class.php on line 1095

Any suggestions?

Mark,
I feel as though this might be a rookie mistake, but I can't seem to get past step 4. After uploading the files into their proper places, and I login to MT, I am NOT redirected to an upgrade screen.

Running MT4, and trying to upgrade from 1.6 to Pro.

Suggestions?

Visitor Stats Pro appears to break the MT dashboard graphs under MT4.2 RC4.

Same thing under MT 4.2 full release, although when I set up a new site using professional it works just fine.

My visitor stats no longer works.

It worked for almost a month. I experimented with changing publishing settings from static to dynamic (reverted to static) and Visitor Stats hasn't worked since. My SQL tables show no additional data since that date.

I looked at permissions for the stats.php file.

I've reviewed documentation for the tags.

No luck. Any ideas?

Was there any fix ever found for the dashboard with broken graphics? Whenever we have data in mt_visitorstats_views the dashboard quits working for blogs with data.

It has nothing to do with the data. For some reason though, the dashboard widget is only spitting out the li tags for the tabs then it dies before spitting out the embed code. This is only the case on blogs that I've installed the templates for. Any ideas?

Dashboard breakage over here, also.
The blog stats widget is completely useless now, only displaying the Entries and Comments tabs, and nothing below.

Hi, do you will develope in the future for the pro version, the feature "unique page views" per post & per author?

regards