Count Views Plugin

The Count Views Plugin is for Grav CMS. It's a simple and naive page view counter.

Installation

Installing the Count Views plugin can be done in one of two ways. The GPM (Grav Package Manager) installation method enables you to quickly and easily install the plugin with a simple terminal command, while the manual method enables you to do so via a zip file.

GPM Installation (Preferred)

The simplest way to install this plugin is via the Grav Package Manager (GPM) through your system's terminal (also called the command line). From the root of your Grav install type:

bin/gpm install count-views

This will install the Count Views plugin into your /user/plugins directory within Grav. Its files can be found under /your/site/grav/user/plugins/count-views.

Manual Installation

To install this plugin, just download the zip version of this repository and unzip it under /your/site/grav/user/plugins. Then, rename the folder to count-views. You can find these files on GitHub or via GetGrav.org.

You should now have all the plugin files under

/your/site/grav/user/plugins/count-views

NOTE: This plugin is a modular component for Grav which requires Grav and the Error and Problems plugins to operate.

Configuration

Before configuring this plugin, you should copy the user/plugins/count-views/count-views.yaml to user/config/plugins/count-views.yaml and only edit that copy.

Here is the default configuration and an explanation of available options:

enabled: true
datafile: count-views.yaml

• The enabled field lets you turn the plugin off and on.

• datafile is the path and name of the file that contains the count data, relative to user/data.

Usage

This is a simple, naive page view counter. Whenever the Grav system produces a page (cached or not), the route is stored and the count incremented. Obviously if you have a front-end cache that delivers the page without invoking index.php, then the view won't be counted. You also can't filter out views by IP or user (though pull requests are always welcome).

The full view count data is dumped as an associative array (i.e., route => count) into the Twig variable viewcounts. To support backwards compatibility, the counts are also still dumped into the config.plugins.count-views.counts namespace, but this is now officially deprecated and will be removed in a future major release.

Performance

Obviously there is a hit because the plugin has to access a physical file on the drive. In my personal experience, I haven't noticed any meaningful difference. Any suggestions to improve performance would be warmly welcomed.