Make WP-PostViews Work with WP-Super-Cache

Thaya Kareeson

Popularity: 81%

Updated: Jul 10, 2008

In response to JTPratt’s comment on my post, “Make Popularity Contest Work with WP-Super-Cache,” I am releasing a modification of Lester Chan’s WP-PostViews plugin to support counting using Javascript. Please try it out to see if this works for you.

A side note to Lester Chan and Richer Yang (WP-PostViews and WP-PostViews Plus authors repectively). Please feel free to contact me about incorporating these changes into WP-PostViews and/or WP-PostViews Plus so that it can be officially committed to the wp-plugins.org repository. I would create my own version of WP-PostViews in the repository, but do not want to steal your thunder :).

Download:
WP-PostViews JS Mod for WordPress 2.5

Note:
Modded Plugin only tested to work with WordPress 2.5 and is probably not backwards compatible with WordPress 2.3.3 or earlier versions.

Special Installation Instructions:
Intallation works the same way as the original WP-PostViews except that you will need to do ONE OF THE FOLLOWING:

Place a symbolic link from wp-content/wp-postviews-js.php -> plugins/wp-postviews/wp-postviews-js.php
Move wp-postviews-js.php directly under your wp-content/ directory

That should be all. I would really appreciate it if you can provide any feedback (security issues, better implementations, or other important thing that I’m totally not aware of). Also please feel free to email me with questions and keep me posted on how things are going with the plugin.

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30 Responses to “Make WP-PostViews Work with WP-Super-Cache”

Rosyidi (Check me out!) commented on April 30th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
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3.2
Thanks a lot.

[Reply]
Thaya Kareeson (Check me out!) commented on April 30th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
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3.5
@Rosyidi
You’re welcome! Please feel free to send me any questions or comments about this modification. And if you really like it, please write about it :-).

[Reply]
Rosyidi (Check me out!) commented on April 30th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
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3.2
I stil don’t understand abut “Place a symbolic link”. What is symbolic means?
Maybe I’ll repost this plugin on May 3.

[Reply]
Thaya Kareeson (Check me out!) commented on April 30th, 2008 at 8:42 pm
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3.5
@Rosyidi

You can find information about what symbolic links are at Wikipedia. Symbolic links are only available on a Unix/Linux environment. If you are hosting from a Windows machine, you can just move wp-postviews-js.php directly under your wp-content/ directory to achieve the same effect. Hope this helps.

[Reply]
JTPratt's Blogging Mistakes (Check me out!) commented on May 2nd, 2008 at 8:00 pm

I thank you for this fix - it worked GREAT on one of my sites! It didn’t (and may never) on my main site though, since I use 4 dozen odd plugins. I wonder, sezwho was one problem I had, as well as wp-postratings by lester chan.

What happens with the WP-Stats plugin (wordpress.com official stats) when wp-super-cache is enabled? Are views of cached pages counted in your stats, or not?

[Reply]
justfrank commented on May 3rd, 2008 at 5:35 am

It works. And it works GREAT!
Moving wp-postviews-js.php into wp-content was enough, no need to mess with symbolic links, for who doesn’t know how to do this

[Reply]
Thaya Kareeson (Check me out!) commented on May 3rd, 2008 at 9:51 am

@JTPratt

What is your main site? I’m not sure why it’s not working on your main site, but I believe the reason could be that the Javascript in this mod clashes with one of your other plugins’ Javascript. The mod I did here is supposed to work with any other cache plugin, but WP-Super-Cache is supposed to have a hook called “add_cacheaction” that can be used to add a count action. I’ll look into it to see if this method would work (and probably write a post about it if it does).

@justfrank

Thank you for visiting! I’m glad that the mod worked out for you.

[Reply]
Thaya Kareeson (Check me out!) commented on May 3rd, 2008 at 9:54 am

@JTPratt

I forgot to answer the second part of your question. I’m pretty sure the WP-Stats plugin will not record hits if WP-Super-Cache is enabled. That said, I think it can also benefit from the method of using WP-Super-Cache’s add_cacheaction hook. I’ll explore this further and keep you posted on my findings.

[Reply]
JTPratt's Blogging Mistakes (Check me out!) commented on May 3rd, 2008 at 12:27 pm

My main site is http://www.jtpratt. Now, after 24 hours - my other site I thought everything was working on isn’t registering and counts on postviews at all. On the other hand, WP-Stats seems to be working fine ( so far )…

[Reply]
Thaya Kareeson (Check me out!) commented on May 4th, 2008 at 11:06 am

@JTPratt

Interesting, I will have to look into WP-Stats to see how it works. Thank you.

[Reply]
sylv3rblade (Check me out!) commented on May 6th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
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3.1
I can’t seem to make it work. Postviews doesn’t count even when Super Cache is off. Do you have a list of compatible plugins or at least those that have conflicts with this?

[Reply]
Thaya Kareeson (Check me out!) commented on May 6th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
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3.5
@sylv3rblade

Sorry I do not have a list of compatible/conflicting plugins. Please stay tuned, I will be releasing a non-javascript version soon (within the next day or two). Sorry for the delay!

[Reply]
sylv3rblade (Check me out!) commented on May 6th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
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3.1
Err no wait.. Scratch that. I forgot about the symbolic link. Umm… does shared hosting even support that? Can I use .htaccess?

[Reply]
Thaya Kareeson (Check me out!) commented on May 6th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
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@sylv3rblade

It depends on your shared host. I recommend just moving wp-postviews-js.php directly under your wp-content/ directory if your hosting does not support symbolic links.

[Reply]
sylv3rblade (Check me out!) commented on May 6th, 2008 at 5:36 pm
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3.1
Thanks. I got it working now. I think I screwed up the first time because I had a copy of wp-postviews-js.php on both the wp-content directory and the wp-postviews directory

Thanks again.

[Reply]
hendra (Check me out!) commented on May 7th, 2008 at 8:38 pm
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2.5
Thanks a lot. Just advice to the others, if you activate this plugin, its better to you to delete the cache of wp-super-cache, after activating this plugin.

[Reply]
Thaya Kareeson (Check me out!) commented on May 7th, 2008 at 8:55 pm
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3.5
@sylv3rblade

I’m glad it works out for you.

@hendra

I’m glad it works out for you too, and thank you for your advice.

[Reply]
Rosyidi (Check me out!) commented on May 8th, 2008 at 3:24 am
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3.2
I will be releasing a non-javascript version soon

@ Thaya : Than, it still work on wp super cache?

[Reply]
Thaya Kareeson (Check me out!) commented on May 8th, 2008 at 9:21 am
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3.5
@Rosyidi

Yes, I will make use of WP-Super-Cache’s add_cacheaction hook to get WP-PostViews to count without Javascript while WP-Super-Cache is enabled. After evaluating the code, there is more work involved than I first thought, but it should be more efficient than the Javascript version when finished.

[Reply]
Thaya Kareeson (Check me out!) commented on May 11th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
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3.5
@All

Unfortunately, it turns out that I misunderstood the add_cacheaction hook. Previously, I thought that add_cacheaction hook gets called every time before a cached page is delivered. I was wrong and there currently is no such hook available in WP-Super-Cache right now. I will definitely make a request to Donncha to add this to WP-Super-Cache. So as it stands, you are stuck with the JS Mod version of WP-PostViews.

I have to appologize for getting your hopes up. The WP-Super-Cache code is quite complex (if Donncha doesn’t walk you through it :)), so it took me a while to figure this out.

[Reply]
Rosyidi (Check me out!) commented on May 23rd, 2008 at 5:37 am
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3.2
I think you are expert on wp-super-cache. Could you convert this plugin for wp-super cache?
http://privism.org/blog/archives/12
It’s simple plugin I think. Couse only 25 lines.
Thanks a lot.

[Reply]
Thaya Kareeson (Check me out!) commented on May 24th, 2008 at 10:29 am
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3.5
@Rosyidi
Let me look into it. I will get back to you :-).

[Reply]
Andy (Check me out!) commented on May 27th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
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3.6 (1 person)
Hi man! Thanks for your small hack. Actually I’m quite some Validation and Clean-HTML-Freak and I found out the Tidy HTML has some problems with the code of wp-postview.php.. Looks like you’d have to change the Javascript-code quite a bit to get it validated. I’m not quite sure if there would be an easier solution than mine, but at least it validates fine and makes no problems… This is for line 76 and following:
echo ”;
echo ‘// <![CDATA[';
echo 'wp_postviews_js_url = "DOMAINNAME/wp-content/wp-postviews-js.php";';
echo 'document.write("";
echo '");';
echo '// ]]>’;
echo ”;

[Reply]
Andy (Check me out!) commented on May 27th, 2008 at 2:04 pm
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2.5
Hmmm, of course this got f**ed up by the commenting system.. I’ll try again, instead of ** you’d have to use “<”:
echo ‘**script type=”text/javascript”**’;
echo ‘// **\/script>”;
echo ‘”);’;
echo ‘// ]]>’;
echo ‘**/script>’;

[Reply]
Thaya Kareeson (Check me out!) commented on May 27th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
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3.5
@Andy

Thank you for the clean-HTML fixes. I suffer from a mild code O.C.D myself so I totally understand. I will include this change into the zip archive and notify Lester Chan tonight. And please remember to write about it if you like it :).

[Reply]
Thaya Kareeson (Check me out!) commented on May 28th, 2008 at 11:53 pm
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3.5
I have incorporated Andy’s clean-HTML fixes and repacked it into the downloadable zip. Enjoy!

[Reply]
funnylolfunny (Check me out!) commented on June 17th, 2008 at 9:08 pm
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2.5
hi.. installed.. but not working (2.5.1) missed anything?
i cannot make the symbolic link.. i just move the wp-postviews-js.php to /wp-content

how? example http://funnylolfunny.com/orange-escape/

[Reply]
funnylolfunny (Check me out!) commented on June 17th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
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2.5
cool!!!! its working now.. thanks Thaya! you rock!

[Reply]
Thaya Kareeson (Check me out!) commented on June 17th, 2008 at 9:19 pm
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3.5
@funnylolfunny
I’m so happy every time I get a message like yours. Thank you for the compliment and I’m glad that it works out for you.

[Reply]
graphicscale (Check me out!) commented on July 29th, 2008 at 7:04 pm
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2.5
thank very much thaya ^^.

[Reply]