Tweaking the WP-StatPress WordPress Plugin

Posted on by acme

I’ve tried a few statistics plugins for WordPress. You know, such, where the visits per day, week, month, etc are counted, and a lot other information, too. Below is a (by far not complete) list of WordPress statistics plugins I’ve tried. But all of them didn’t meet my needs in one ore more things. But the StatPress plugin, has also disadvantages I don’t like. One of it is, you can’t adjust the number of results for Last hists, Last search terms, Last referrest, Last agents, Last Pages and Last Spiders.
And this is exactly where this article comes into the game. I’ve wrote a little patch, that makes this adjustable.

List of a few Statistics Plugins for WordPress:

After trying more of less thoroughly the listed statistic plugins above, I finally ended up on StatPress again. This because of various reasons. I’m using a self-modified Blocks2 theme, and StatPress was almost the only statistics plugin, that played nicely with it. Or the statistics started to collect data from the point in time of their installation. For a person like me, who doesn’t have patience at all, this is almost unacceptable. Some plugins didn’t show some data at all, or one had to create an account somewhere else. I don’t like such practice.

Back to StatPress, I’ve decided to insert a additional option to the Options Menu, where you can choose between different numbers for your result list.

     

All you have to do is to download the wp-statpress-lastitems.diff (patch file). and apply it in the WordPress directory:

  • Download: wp-statpress-lastitems.diff
      Perform this in your WordPress directory:

      cd /usr/share/wordpress
patch -p0 -i wp-statpress-lastitems.diff

      I’m using WordPress 2.7.0 atm, and the patch above is against StatPress version 1.2.9.2.

      Feedback welcome.

5 thoughts on “Tweaking the WP-StatPress WordPress Plugin”

  1. StatPress is an absolutely horrid plugin to use. I’m a MySQL DBA for a major world-wide internet hosting company and I see people using StatPress on their WP blogs and it kills the performance of the server, and their site. Not only does it store massive amounts of data, but the database design is just downright horrible. Tables and columns that are regularly queried are missing integral indexes that can improve performance. Additionally, all data fields are by default TEXT data type, which is BAD!. This plugin should be avoided at all costs until the developer can fix her huge mistakes. By changing a few data types and adding a couple indexes, I’ve taken queries from this plugin from examining 140k plus rows, down to examining less than 1800 rows, a 78% decrease in rows examined. I recommend “Google Analytics for WordPress” or “Wordpress.com Stats” (the latter requires an API key from wordpress.com, the former is obviously used in conjunction with Google Analytics, which is a great stat tracking software). A newer version called StatPress Reloaded has been released, as the original SP plugin is no longer supported by the developer, however it suffers from the same design flaws as the original plugin.

    I’ll agree that the features of the plugin are nice, including the real-time monitoring, the GUI, and the sheer amount of data collected. However, the design flaws mentioned previously can spell disaster for your website, especially if it is a popular site.

  2. @PoundBangWhack.com
    I fully agree. I’m not using this plugin now for more than half a year. Google Analytics does not offer a “real time” overview, but it’s not that heavy on CPU.
    If someone likes real time data, can use awstats, or tools like that.

    Thanks for your post.

    And yes – avoid it as possible.

  3. After poking around a bit with the plugin itself (I’m hoping to improve on it further and will let you know if/when I do), I retract my previous statement that this is a horrid plugin. The plugin itself is nice and has some great features and incredibly useful data. However, the way it goes about getting and storing that data is what is bad. The database design itself is bad and causes major problems, if left unchecked. However, if repaired, it can make this plugin much better and your site won’t suffer performance because of it. If I get around to fixing this plugin, I’ll be sure to post here.

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