[Plugin: WP-PostViews] WP Post Views With W3 Total Cache ?

@frederick, if I want paid support from you for this, what will it cost me? (I know there’s a Support page in the plugin admin, but I can’t figure out which option I should choose).

The compatibility test isn’t really relevant at the moment. I see you sent me an email so I will reply offline.

I tried to add the lines of code as suggested by ezzal but it still doesn’t work on my blog.

Any update on this?

In disk enhanced mode WordPress is not loaded unless there is no cache for the page. So a stat counter plugin is not going to work properly unless you use disk basic, and even so, the same problem can occur.

In disk enhanced mode WordPress is not loaded unless there is no cache for the page. So a stat counter plugin is not going to work properly unless you use disk basic, and even so, the same problem can occur.

So this means that there’s no way I can make a stat counter plugin to work properly when W3 is enabled?

It has nothing to do with W3TC. The point is *any* page caching plugin will not allow most counters to work properly if WordPress has to be loaded for the counter to work.

Bummer. Thanks for clearing things up.

You’re welcome.

WP-PostViews does work when the disk enhanced page cache is enabled. It sends an Ajax request to the wp-postviews.php file. If that detects that WordPress isn’t loaded, then it loads WordPress, negating the problem Frederick mentioned above.

However, it does have a problem with the database caching. If database caching is turned on, then although WP-Postviews receives the Ajax request, it’s call to update the DB does not seem to work. Well actually it does work once every 180 seconds (or whatever interval you have set for database caching).

To get around this, you need add an ignored query stem of wp_postmeta, as WP-PostViews stores the views as a Custom Field for each post.

Once you’ve done this it should be happily counting the page views you get – but…

If the page is cached, although it will be counting views behind the scenes, it won’t be able to display them. Each time the page is cleared from the cache (for example when a comment is made, or it’s been cached too long), the post view count will be updates, but then the page will get cached again and it will freeze until it’s next cleared.

Okay, I’ve now written a plugin to resolve the problem with displaying the count. It’s testing fine and I’ve applied to add it to the plugin directory. It should be up early next week and I’ll link to it from here.

Note, this only fixes the problem with displaying the count. You’ll still need to add the database stem of wp_postmeta as mentioned above.

For anyone interested, here’s what the plugin does:

Lester was nice enough to add a filter into WP-PostViews the_views function. The plugin uses that to wrap the count with span tags with a certain class and id (containing the post ID).

The plugin then adds some jQuery to the footer. This finds all the counts (there may be more than one the page) and gets the post ID from each. It then sends an Ajax request to the server, which looks up the counts and sends them back to the page, which updates the appropriate count field.

Obviously, doing this is going to take up more server resources. The server script will run once for each page load and will look up the DB to get the count (on pages with more than one post, such as the home page, it will have to look up each one). In the bigger scheme of things, you are only losing a small bit of what you’ve gained by using a caching plugin, but nonetheless you need to be aware it will have some impact on performance.

The plugin is called Ajax_the_views and is now available on my web development blog or the WordPress Plugin Directory.

I hope that helps someone – it’s certainly fixed the problem for me.

Thanks Stephen.

Since I’ve been using WP-PostViews since 2007 and did not run into this problem prior to installing the latest version of W3 Total Cache, would I be able to import number of views from one plugin to another? I am sorry if this question is waaaay out there.

Ezzal, where did you exactly place this code?
define(‘DONOTCACHEPAGE’, true);
define(‘DONOTCACHEDB’, true);
define(‘DONOTCACHCEOBJECT’, true);

I added it at the top of wp-postviews.php but that changed nothing. I added it below the first section and it ruined my theme look !

Any solutions to this problem?

Thanks