Views Plugin

The Views Plugin is for Grav CMS version 1.6+. This is a simple views count tracking plugin. You can use it several ways, but by default it will automatically track all site page requests and use the page route as the identifying key. There is no limiting, tracking, or refresh detection, it simply tracks the number of times a page has been loaded.

Installation

Installing the Views plugin can be done in one of two ways. The GPM (Grav Package Manager) installation method enables you to quickly and easily install the plugin with a simple terminal command, while the manual method enables you to do so via a zip file.

It has a requirement of the Grav Database plugin as it stores the views in a simple, file-based sqlite database file. This will automatically be installed if you use GPM.

GPM Installation (Preferred)

The simplest way to install this plugin is via the Grav Package Manager (GPM) through your system's terminal (also called the command line). From the root of your Grav install type:

bin/gpm install views

Requirements

Other than standard Grav requirements, this plugin requires the Database plugin, which in turn has some system requirements:

• SQLite3 Database
• PHP pdo Extension
• PHP pdo_sqlite Driver

| PHP by default comes with PDO and the vast majority of linux-based systems already come with SQLite.

Configuration

Before configuring this plugin, you should copy the user/plugins/views/views.yaml to user/config/plugins/views.yaml and only edit that copy.

Here is the default configuration and an explanation of available options:

enabled: true
autotrack: true    

The configuration options are as follows:

• enabled - enable or disable the plugin instantly
• autotrack - by default, views will track all pages using the onPageInitialized event, disable this to track manually

Usage

The default behavior is for the view plugin to track all page requests and keep a running total of how many times the pages have been hit. You can change this behavior by first disabling the autotrack: configuration option, then using the Twig function to track a page hit, or if you want to track via another plugin, you can use a simple PHP command.

In Views 1.0.1 we re-worked the database structure to allow multiple view types. If you installed and tested version 1.0.0, please delete your user/data/views/views.db so it can be regenerated

Twig Tracking

To track via Twig, you can use the default track_views(id) twig function, an id is required, and a type is optional because it defaults to pages. For example, to track the current page from a twig template:

{% do track_views(page.route) %}

or specify a custom type

{% do track_views(page.route, 'widgets') %}

PHP Tracking

To track via PHP, you can use the default views object with a required id attribute. A type is optional because it defaults to pages. For example, to track the current page from a PHP file:

Grav::instance()['views']->track($page->route());

or

Grav::instance()['views']->track($page->route(), 'widgets');

Viewing

Via the administrator plugin, you can view the current counts of the top 20 views by Visiting the Reports tab in the Tools section. There will be an entry called Grav Views. Alternatively you can query via the CLI or accessing the Views object directly and iterating over the values:

Grav::instance()['views']->getAll(null, 20, 'desc')

CLI Commands

There are currently two built in commands:

List (ls) Command

bin/plugin views ls

There are some optional parameters:

bin/plugin views ls '/typography'

This will return the information for a specific slug

bin/plugin views ls --limit 10 --sort asc

This will return the information for a specific type

bin/plugin views ls --type widgets --limit 10 --sort asc

the limit, will limit the amount of rows returned, and the sort will can be either asc or desc

Set Command

The set command allows you to set a specific value for an entry:

bin/plugin views set /bar 17

Will set the number of views with id '/bar' to the value 17 and defaults to type pages

or

bin/plugin views set /bar 17 foos

Will set the number of views with id '/bar' to the value 17 and defaults to type foos