How to add visitor/visitors counter in Joomla
based website using the VINAORA joomla plugin
One of the websites based on Joomla, that I'm managing, had to have
the option to show a
Visitors Counter on the page
bottom.
I did some research online to check for some Joomla plugins that
are capable of aiming my Joomla installation with the
Visitor
Counter feature.
There are a couple of plugins available out there that are able to
provide a Joomla installation with a
Web Counter, however
I'll just mention the few which I have tested myself.
The ones I've tested myself are;
1. VCNT
2. Count your Visitors
3. Cool Hits Counter
and finally the one that I really liked the most:
4. VINAORA
All the prior 3 aforementioned
VCNT, Count your Visitors and
Cool Hits Counter, are actually working right after
installation. I haven't had the time to test them thoroughfully but
from a first look they appear to be counting the visitors.
The
Count your visitors - joomla plugin's download main page
was in German with no option to revert to English, so that wasn't
nice.
Though the plugin seems to work fine after just downloaded and
installed and configured from
Extensions -> Module Manager
The configuration options for
Count your visitors are quite
obscure but if you're a looking for a really simple way to count
your Joomla based website visitors it might be a good choice. The
plugin is based on the initial Joomla module called
Statistics.
By the way I've read some reports online that actually Joomla 1.5
also includes some kind of minimal integrated web counter embedded
in itself throughout the
Joomla Statistics module .
However I personally couldn't really follow the methods describe to
take advantage of the Joomla install integrated Statistics module,
however if somebody has already succeeded in using the Statistics
default joomla module I'll be glad, if he shares with me.
I've found the VCNT visitor statistics plugin a handy one, but this
module had this major problem that the
VCNT 1.5 text which
was appearing as a heading before the statistics was hard to wipe
out of my web page, so eventually I got pissed of and thought and
tested the
Cool Hits Counter.
The
Cool Hits Counter is actually a simplistic module which
presents a counter about visitors on the web site in numeric digit
numbers.
These module uses the integrated Joomla 1.5 module
mod_stats
the only difference is the support for numeric digit numbers.
As I've said none of the above modules wasn't flexible enough and
therefore wasn't what I was looking for, thus I decided to use my
installed
VINAORA Joomla web(users) counter plugin.
The
VINAORA is actually quite straight foward to configure,
right after installation to start with the configuration I had to
navigate to:
Extension -> Module Manager -> Vinaora Visitors Counter
-> Module Parameters
Extension -> Module Manager -> Vinaora Visitors Counter ->
Module Parameters
Sine I wanted just a simple counter without any external statistics
I personally prefered using Vinaora's counter with the
options
Display Mode: Simple as well as the
Zero-Statistics turned on to (Yes)
Some of the other options I found to be best matching my desires
for the
Visitors Counter was:
Show Title: No and
Position: Left
Now I had this shiny visitors statistics in my Joomla installation
but there was the annoying Link in my
Visitors Counter
appearing on the page, thus in order to remove the default link
Visitors Counter which was pointing to the VINAORA's web
page, I had to edit the file:
modules/mod_vvisit_counter/tmpl/default.php located in my
Joomla Document Root directory.
First I've edited the code on
line 21 where I've removed out
the
Vinaora string since I didn't wanted any reference to
Vinaora to occur in my Joomla HTML code.
In
line 162 in the code:
$html .= '<div>';
$html .= '<a href="http://vinaora.com" target="_self"
title="Vinaora Visit'>;
$html .= 'Vinaora Visitors Counter '.VERSION_MODULE.' for Joomla!"
</a>';
$html .= 'Vinaora Visitors Counter