Playing Nice with ShortStat

The real question is when is the new version of shortstat going to be ready for public consumption?

…And for the last time, it’s TXP, not TP! I’m using Textpattern right, not Toilet Paper. ;)

No problem, Shaun.

I’ve got the opposite problem (over promise, under deliver) going with my little project (TypeSpace). I was hoping to have it out the door around around a month and a half ago, and it’s still not ready to go. I’ve just got way too much going on right now (including a bunch of stuff that I had no idea was going to happen when I threw the mid Sept. ETA)… Hopefully I learned a lesson, though I’m not sure what it is. ;)

Perfect timing for this post! Tonight, I am implementing ShortStat on my WordPress-powered site.

The one thing that I was going to request is that you post a full version of the latest Short Stat in the meantime so that people don’t have to install the older version and then find the update and run it. That exact problem is what has kept me from installing it until now. But I hear the software is just so damn good that I just have to have it.

Yeah, just thought I’d give some feedback.

Hmm…

The ShortStat include is the very first item in my WordPress template, which means it comes before the wp-blog-header.php include, and I haven’t noticed any problems with ShortStat because of it.

What problems have been seen from having ShortStat included before the WordPress code?

Shaun, does the inc.stats.php file still call die() when it cannot access the database? I personally find this quite unacceptable; why would you stop showing the contnets of the file, if the stats are not working?

I changed it to a simple if clause:

if($shortstat && SI_pconnect()) {
 ...
}

and that change requires that the database connection function returns true on success and false on failure.

I also put the include statement at the end of the pages, as then the user is already reading the page and wouldn’t care more about if the stats is taking somewhat longer.

This sucks, I am always on the back burner. I want my ShortStan.

Ryan Berg, The problem I had is that if the ShortStat include came before the wp-blog-header.php include, that page would not be listed individually in the Resources column of ShortStat. All the other stats appeared to work beautifully, and I still had number reflective of the total hits being displayed at the top of the Resources column, but nothing about how many times specific resources were getting accessed.

If you aren’t having this issue, then a) I feel sheepish, and b) I wonder what little detail was causing me grief… :

I wonder if someone knows how to get it working on IPB forums (Invision Power Board, version 1.2). The template admin modules don’t allow any direct php, so it’d have to go in a certain spot in a certain file.

Does anyone know what that spot is, or does someone have a better way?

Seth,

My ShortStat doesn’t appear to be having that problem. You can take a look for yourself at My ShortStat Page.

Akaxaka,

Simply put it somewhere in the PHP instead of the templates. I’m running ShortStat on one of my sites and have also installed it on a phpBB2 forum without any problems. I don’t know IPB’s PHP structure, but just drop the include line in the PHP that makes up the footer of every page.

Shaun, while the code works beautifully, I have one suggestion to make. My error logs keep getting PHP Notices from ShortStat. The same error keeps popping up, saying that variable X is undefined. A copy of my error log can be found here. This can easily be solved by using this syntax to retrieve variables: $var = (isset($_GET['var_name'])) ? $_GET['var_name'] : '';

It’s not a serious problem, but it does help you maintain good coding practices.

Mr. Berg,

Would you mind posting(or emailing) part of one of your site templates that includes ShortStat as well as WordPress? I am curious to compare and contrast it with my setup so as to get to the bottom of this. I would not be surprised if my rearranging of the include calls was merely coincidental. I can share my template setup as well and perhaps we can both figure some things out…

Ryan and I spoke after he posted this, and we agreed on the following: As long as the ShortStat include is, well, included on every page, it doesn’t really matter where in index.php you call it (as long as it is run). It could be run before the wp-blog-header.php include, after the wp-blog-header.php, and I am pretty sure that you can even run it from within wp-blog-header.php! If the last option is true, I would say that it is probably the best option, as it keeps your index.php file nice and clean.

Then my issue must be related to the script I run at the start of every page:

<?
// Check for UA acceptance of XML and serve as such, else serve as HTML
$mime="html"; //serve as HTML by default
// if the UA accepts application/xhtml+xml, serve as XML
if(stristr($_SERVER["HTTP_ACCEPT"],"application/xhtml+xml")){$mime="xml";}
if($mime=="xml") //if we're serving as XML
{
    header("Content-Type: application/xhtml+xml"); //content type header
    echo "<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>n"; //xml processing instruction
}
else{header("Content-Type: text/html");} // else, we're serving as HTML
?>

Before the n in the line preceding //xml processing instruction is where the xml prolog goes, but it gets edited out by Shaun’s blog software.

Anyhoo, I know this for certain: The first three lines are 1) Include script above; 2) Include wp-blog-header.php; 3) Include ShortStat … and if I switch 2 and 3, that page will not record hits in the resources column. Everything else works as intended, I believe, though I don’t know if that file no longer registers hits in general either. I don’t know enough about ShortStat.

Similarly, I don’t know what would cause this conflict…

Here you go, Seth. This is the very top of my index.php file.

<?php 
// ShortStat Function
@include_once($_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"]."/shortstat/inc.stats.php"); 
?>
<?php 
/* Don't remove this line. */
require('wordpress/wp-blog-header.php');
?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html>

Well hrmm… like I say, I’m not sure what the deal is then. Perhaps something with declaring headers in my _init script, and then something that happens in the WP include ends up conflicting with ShortStat if it is included before WP??? I’m not terribly savvy with PHP, so if anybody can shed some light on this, I’ll send you hohos.*

*By hohos I mean no hohos at all.

Has anyone got this working with Expression Engine? I dropped the php include at the top of my index file and it doesn’t seem to be recording anything. Thanks for nay info.

i am not sure why the link before isn’t working, anyways, this link works in case you need to look at the code (follow the “all blogs” link)

My Site

[quote] The ShortStat include must come after the textpattern(); function call in each of your section files. [/quote]

Hmm, this doesn’t work for me. If I include the code before the textpattern(); function, then it works alright!

I tried to get ShortStat to run with MT PHP. No go so far. I’m getting an error message from the Smarty engine saying it can’t connect to the database through localhost. That’s the problem, my database isn’t located at localhost. The script works perfectly on regular PHP pages though (I’m running as PHP-CGI on Dreamhost). I only get an error in Dynamic PHP Movable Type pages.

Shaun, you absolutely rock.

Thanks for being so completely transparent and awesome. I’m learning so much from you.