[innerindex]Work on bsuite3 is progressing well, thanks to help from Zach and Matt, who are collaborating with me on completely rearchitecting how stats are collected and reported. This, however, is not bs3. It’s a transitional release intended to fix some bugs in b2 and make upgrading easier. This upgrade is recommended for all current bsuite users and new users.
bsuite Features
- Tracks page loads (hits)
- Tracks search terms used by visitors ariving at your site via search engines
- Reports top-performing stories via a function that can be included in the sidebar
- Reports recent comments via a function that can be included in the sidebar
- Reports top search terms via a function that can be included in the sidebar
- Outputs a pulse graph of activity on your site or specific stories
- Lists related posts at the bottom of the current post’s content
- Suggests posts that closely match the search criteria for visitors who arrive via search engines
- Integrates bsuite_speedcache
- Does some stuff with tags
Fixed/Changed/Added
- As mentioned above, a huge-but-invisible feature here is that this version includes some pieces that will make it easy to transition to the new plugin.
- MySQL errors while creating the tables should now be fixed. It’s my shame that these have persisted so long.
- The plugin now “rebuilds the tags table” as soon as you activate it. This is a good thing, but if you’ve got a huge number of posts (or a really short max execution time) it might cause a problem (please leave a comment if it does).
- The related posts feature now works even if you aren’t tagging your posts. If there are no tags, the post’s title is used as a search string.
- This list is probably incomplete and in some other way inaccurate. It’s not intentional, I’m just sloppy. Please leave comments with bug reports or corrections, I’ll do what I can to fix them.
- Finally, I’m now hosting the download on a new server, so it won’t be subject to .Mac’s bandwidth consumption limits.
Installation
- Download and unzip bsuite.zip
- Place bsuite.php in you wp-content/plugins directory
- Place spacer.gif in your wp-content directory
- Log in to your WordPress admin panel and activate the plugin, then visit the new bsuite submenu of the options tab. This will allow bsuite to create its database tables.
- Stats collection will start automatically; you can see the results in the new bsuite Reports submenu of your Dashboard
- Once installed, be sure to enable the options and consider customizing the look by adding the bsuite CSS to your theme’s CSS (sample CSS here).
- In order to view the stats reports reports on your public pages, you’ll need to add the display functions to your pages.
Upgrading
- Upgrades from earlier versions of bsuite are easy, just replace the old
bsuite.phpfile with the new one. - Don’t forget to visit the bsuite submenu of the options tab so you can setup any new features.
Commands
The bsuite submenu of the options has a few command buttons:
-
Clear bsuite_speedcache
The cache improves performance, but can sometimes get stale before its time. This command clears it.
-
Rebuild bsuite tag index
bsuite maintains its tag index with every story edit. Use this command to bring old-content into the index or if you’ve edited the content in way WP doesn’t know about.
Options
The bstat submenu of the options tab has a few configurable settings:
-
Minimum userlevel to view bsuite reports
The options are restricted to administrators, but you can choose who can view the reports.
-
Output default CSS
Some of the bsuite functions require CSS styles not found in the average style sheet. This will output default styles.
-
Default pulse graph style
This sets how values are interpolated in drawing the pulse graph. Experiment with the options to see how they work.
-
Suggest related entries in post
This will insert a block of links at the tail of each (tagged) post’s content with links to related posts at your site.
-
Tag input format
Name your style: square brackets or angle brackets /
<tags>or[tags]. -
Highlight search words and offer search help
The first part of this should be obvious, but the real trick here is using those search words to offer other related content from your site to visitors. It works (and looks) a lot like the option above, but the suggestions only appear when search words are detected.
-
Filter incoming search terms using comment moderation and blacklist words
Referrer spam is as much of a problem as trackback spam. There are a few tricks in bstat to prevent the problem, but here’s one you can configure. Selecting this option tells bstat to not display search terms that contain words in your moderation list or blacklist.
-
Ignore hits from registered users at or above userlevel
No author wants to skew their stats just by poking around their own site.
-
Ignore hits from these IP numbers
Sites with low traffic may find that activity by authors severely skews the stats tracking. Enter an IP address here to ignore it.
Tag Support
Until WordPress adopts a standardized way to manage tags, we’ll have to deal with things like this.
bsuite recognizes tags in three forms:
- Any link with a
rel=“tag”attribute - Any number of single tags like this:
<tag>tag name</tag> - A block of comma-delimited tags like this:
<tags>WordPress, WordPress Plugin</tags>
This appears to make it compatible with a number of existing tag management strategies now in use — including those used by Ecto and SimpleTags.
Tags are mapped to Technorati, but a future version will include an option to set other tag resolvers.
Using bsuite Functions
Function usage is unchanged from the last version. Among the things at the top of the list for bs3: widgets.
Known Bugs
None yet, but I’m sure I’m forgetting something. Report what you find in the comments below.
Money Grubbing
bsuite is GPL-licensed free software, but after some urging by friends, I’m opening the tip jar. If you use it and like it, let me know. And if you feel moved, leave a tip in the jar.