Building a better Simple Page View Counter

Currently this site has a very basic view counter on it. 

Here is how it currently works.

Load the page, function checks if the page has a existing record for this class and page uid, if it does not have one then it adds one with the hit value of 1, if it already finds a record for it, then it loads that value and adds one to it. You can see this currently working as you reload the page, and the counter goes up. This is fine for a very basic hit counter, but we can add a lot more functionality to this with the addition of just a couple of extra fields. 

Lets add the following fields.

PHP

Week Number = $this->week = date("W"); // week as a number from 1-52
Month Number = $this->month = date('m'); // month number 01 - 12
Year Number = $this->year = date('y'); // year number

Im not sure if i want to drill all the way down to Day Number as this may create a few too many database records. As it is with the week month and years it will create for each page that has the hit counter enabled a record, so the more fields i add, the more it will add to the table, even though the table size is negligible. 

The only issue with this kind of data is that is keeps expanding, unless we add some kind of delete function to it after a certain amount of time, like only keeping the hits data for a year or that kind of thing. 

After a year or so, you could delete the weekly and monthly data and just archive it to a yearly view maybe, just need to keep an eye on the table sizes.

Add View Function

Here is how i would add the view on each page. 

PHP

// in the class add
public $fields_array = array();

// add a game view.
    $views->title = $class->title;
    $views->fields_array["linked_class"] = $p2;
    $views->fields_array["linked_uid"] = $p3;
    $views->add_view();
```

```php
public function add_view() {
        $this->week = date('W');
    $this->month = date('m');
    $this->year = date('y');
        $this->fields_array["week"] = $this->week;
    $this->fields_array["month"] = $this->month;
    $this->fields_array["year"] = $this->year;
    $fields_array = $this->fields_array;
    if($this->load_from_fields_array($this->fields_array, $max = 1)) {
      // update loaded
      // echo "update
";
      $this->views = $this->views + 1;
      $this->update();

    } else {
      // add new
      //echo "add
";
      $this->linked_class = $this->fields_array["linked_class"];
      $this->linked_uid = $this->fields_array["linked_uid"];
      $this->views = 1;
      $this->add();
    }
    return;
  }
```

Then with this new data we could add some graphs based on hits per week per post or per month, etc. 

then at the end of each page i could write a sentence saying, this page has had number views today, this week, month etc, or make a nice table with that data. 

Thoughts

I was just thinking about this and i think its going to add a new record per day month year, is that ok?

so for every day it will add a new row per page, which could add up to a lot of rows. 

how to extract daily hits data from this. 

need functions to extract details based on day and week

it will do views this week, month and year. so that should not be too much data.

i think i will do seperate functions to extract views numbered by week month and year totals. 

Extracting Views this week

this should extract the views for this week total for the specified linked class and uid. 

PHP

  public function views_week_single() {
    global $functions;
    $out = "";
    $db_table_name = $this->db->escapeString($this->db_table_name);
    $linked_class = $this->db->escapeString($this->fields_array["linked_class"]);
    $linked_uid = $this->db->escapeString($this->fields_array["linked_uid"]);
    $week_num = $this->db->escapeString($this->fields_array["week_num"]);
    $sql = "select * from $db_table_name where
      linked_class = '$linked_class' and
      linked_uid = '$linked_uid' and
      week_num = '$week_num'
      order by hits desc limit $start,$max";
    $result = $this->db->query($sql);
    $views_total = 0;
    while($row = $result->fetchArray()) {
      $views = $row['views'];
      $views_total = $views_total + $views;
    }
    return $views_total;
  }

Lets add that to a widet under the page content. Something like this

Still to do, Month and Year and then all hits totals. 

Views Widget Template

HTML

<style>
  .view-title {
      text-transform: uppercase;
      font-weight: bold;
      font-size: 12px;
      color: #62b174;
      margin-bottom: 5px;
      padding-bottom: 5px;
      border-bottom: 1px solid #3a3a3a;
  }
  .view-number {
      text-transform: uppercase;
      font-weight: bold;
      font-size: 32px;
      color: #FFF;
  }
</style>
<div class='card mb-3 view-stats'>
  <h5 class='card-header'>View Statistics</h5>
  <div class='card-body'>
    <div class='row'>
        <div class='col'>
          <div class='view-title'>
            This Week
          </div>
          <div class='view-number'>
            [@views_week_single]
          </div>
        </div>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

Data seems to be recording ok, after leaving it for a night or so.