[Plugin: WordPress Popular Posts] Count views for logged in subscriber level users too

Hi bitoolean,

Yes, it is against the good practices, however when I first released the plugin the original intention was to count just the views generated by visitors and not by logged-in users. That idea remains true to the day. I might add a way to change this behavior via plugin’s admin page, but it won’t be for now since there are other priorities at the moment.

Sure. Thank you for taking the time to read and reply.

Well apparently nine months have passed and I was hoping it might have become more of a priority up to this time.

Hi there,

This feature was included on version 2.3.3 (see changelog), current version of the plugin is 2.3.5. Please check the FAQ for instructions.

I’m marking this topic as resolved.

Wow! Great!

That should work in my case, but I’d still need to toggle between counting “everyone” (including logged-in users) and “visitors” (guests only) every time I’m testing the website myself… because the plugin’s “Log views from” setting only allows those two options.

What I need (and I was very specific about this) would be an option to log views from guests (non-registered visitors) and subscribers (“subscriber role”-level registered users), ignoring myself, or even better, ignoring the “contributor role” (and up – up to the “administrator”) level users. That option could be named “visitors and subscribers”.

Why rush and declare this issue solved? I repeat, I’d need this feature to use your plugin in my blog because I’m using the Social Login plugin to authenticate visitors/users. They are buttons for several social networks which act as intermediary tertiary log-in pop-ups. The visitor needs to authenticate for example to be given permission to comment on posts. The first time they login using such a tertiary account, they are given a new subscriber-role-level account on the blog created automatically by that plugin, which associates it with the e-mail address belonging to the tertiary website (eg. facebook).

In PHP, I think the conditional code to check whether the logged-in user is of subscriber level and not higher would be: `current_user_can(‘subscriber’) and !current_user_can(‘contributor’)’. I hope this is as easily implemented as it seems. It doesn’t make much sense that I start coding my own plugin or hacking into yours just to do this. There already are too many statistical plugins.

Let me know if it is possible and whether you plan to implement something like this. I’ll be using the “everyone” option meanwhile.
Thank you!

A quick update: I’ve working on the plugin and added a third option to the drop-down, logged-in users only.

Thank you for the detailed explanation, btw! I understand what you want and will probably add a more granular way to log views on future releases. At the moment, I’m focused on fixing / improving other features – once these are resolved / stable I’ll start adding new ones again.

Well if checking for either logged-in users only or guests only is possible, I’m confident that it will be possible to check for “guests and subscribers” too in not too long ?? Thank you for taking the time to answer.

I’m sorry if it’s obvious – I believe I’m expressing myself somewhat confusingly, that’s why I keep trying to make it clearer and it’s become more complicated. Again, just to make sure: having Everyone selected and perhaps another checkbox to “Ignore roles of higher than: Subscriber-level-users”‘ views would suit me perfectly for example.

I already have statistical widgets from WordPress.coms’ plugin JetPack and Google Analytics on my dashboard, but I’m not sure about how they track my own website access. Anyway, my website is not really so significant… it’s more of a journal I keep for myself and few people really read. I also benefit from practicing my web technologies knowledge by modifying it.

Meanwhile, if you could benefit from any way that I can help in, to contribute to this nice project, let me know how to do that – any time. I’d be happy to translate it into my native language for example. Thanks again!