Wibstats

Wibstats is a WordPress plugin that gives a WordPress site, or each blog in a WordPress MU or BuddyPress installation, their own visitor statistics. The data stored includes the page viewed, date and time of visit, visitors browser, operating system and screen resolution, and the geographic location of the visitor (country and city) where it is possible to determine that information.

The plugin uses freely available APIs from several providers to determine the geographic location of the visitor. One of the APIs is chosen randomly for each visit to spread the load across each of the API providers.

A range of graphs and tables are available to users to see the visitors to their blog. WordPress MU site administrators also have the option to easily view the statistics for any particular blog, as well as for the main site.

The plugin relies on the wp_footer action, normally used in the footer.php file of the theme. Without this action no visitor statistics will be stored. Please check each template available to your end users to ensure they all use the wp_footer action.

Shortcodes

WibStats allows you to include statistics from your site in your blog posts and pages. This is done with shortcodes, simple bits of text that set some parameters for the information to display. For example:

[wibstats report="popularsearches"] 

Will give you (for example);

Search          Visitors
search 1        40%
search 2        30%
search 3        20%
search 4        10% 

Please note these examples here are not formatted correctly (due to WordPress readme file restrictions). The proper code looks like this:

<div class="wibstats_report [name of the report]">
<table>
    <thead>
        <tr>
            <th>Column 1</th>
            <th>Column 2</th>
        </tr>
    </thead>
    <tbody>
        <tr>
            <td>Row 1, column 1</td>
            <td>Row 1, column 2</td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td>Row 2, column 1</td>
            <td>Row 2, column 2</td>
        </tr>
    </tbody>
</table>
</div>

Want another example? OK:

[wibstats report="recentcountries"]

Gives:

Country             Time
United Kingdom      9:22 pm
United States       9:21 pm
Portugal            9:18 pm

When showing country names WibStats will also show a small icon of the flag of that country.

There are quite a few different reports you can show (these go in the report="report-name-here" bit).

• popularcountries
  The most popular countries to visit your blog
• popularcities
  The most popular cities to visit your blog
• recentcountries
  The most recent countries to visit your blog
• recentcities
  The most recent cities to visit your blog
• popularbrowsers
  The most popular browsers to visit your blog
• popularplatforms
  The most popular platforms (operating systems) to visit your blog
• popularscreensizes
  The most popular screen sizes to visit your blog
• popularsearches
  The most popular search words which found your blog
• recentsearches
  The most recent search words which found your blog
• populardays
  The most popular days of the week that people visited your blog
• popularhours
  The most popular hours of the day that people visited your blog
• popularmonths
  The most popular months of the year that people visited your blog
• popularreferrers
  The most popular referring websites that sent visitors to your blog
• recentreferrers
  The most recent referring websites that sent visitors to your blog
• session
  A breakdown of the data associated with the current visitor to your blog (their country, city, browser etc)

A couple of other options allow you to configure these reports as they display on your posts/pages.

size

Sets the number of items you want to show (minimum 1, maximum 100)

cache

Sets how long you want the report to be cached for. Caching means that the report isn’t recalculated every time someone visits the page, meaning the page is a little bit faster to load.

The size option is set in minutes, with “0” meaning not-cached-at-all (the report is recalculated every time someone visits the page it appears on) and “-1” for cached forever (the report is generated once then remains the same forever).

So, a couple more examples:

[wibstats report="popularcities" size="25"]

This shows the top 25 most popular cities to visit your blog.

[wibstats report="recentsearches" size="5" cache="0"]

This shows the top 5 latest search words which brought visitors to your blog, and is not cached at all.

[wibstats report="popularreferrers" size="50" cache="-1"]

This shows the top 50 most popular referring websites (sites that have a link to your blog) and is cached forever. This means the report will show what the top referring sites are now and will never be updated.

To-do

• Stats-by-email, where Wibstats will email you daily, weekly or monthly with the latest statistics.
• More ways to slice and dice the existing data. More graphs, perhaps using a serious graphic system (Flot, perhaps).
• A “live” view showing who is visiting your blog Right Now
• Storing the exit time for each page, so reports on how long people spent on your site can be built
• More reports on average pages per visitor

Any further ideas will be gratefully received.