Coming from using b2evo for blogging at ViSLAB and OneTwenty, I was a little disappointed that WordPress (unlike b2evo) doesn’t have any built-in statistics aggregration or visualisation.
Since I’m the curious sort (and I like to see if people are actually reading my blog posts), I spent a bit of time looking into WordPress statistics plugins. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any free “standard” plugin the everyone uses, so I had to conduct my own review.
Google Analytics seems to be popular and I saw a few WordPress plugins that integrate the service, but I don’t really want to use external statistics tracking. For internal statistics tracking, I found a few tools that looked promising:
- Lightstats looked good, but I wanted cold numbers rather than fancy graphics. I was also a little concerned about the load it might put on this (old, old) server.
- Quickstats seemed tidy and popular, but a little too simplistic for me.
- Firestats looked rather impressive and I did go to the trouble (not much) of installing it and checking it out. It worked without a hitch despite the highly visible “this is beta software; use at own risk!” warning on the homepage.
- Counterize is something I came across while installing Firestats. (Firestats asked if there was pre-existing counterize data it could import). Looks good, but I didn’t try it out because I finally settled on…
- WP-SlimStat! It looked great, but I initially had trouble installing it on WordPress 2.0. It actually broke the rest of the blog when enabled! According to various forum posts, this seemed to be a common problem. I found this post on deep jive interests that resolved the problem and it now runs fine (and looks great!)
I’m happy with WP-SlimStat thus far. It integrates SlimStat which is based on ShortStat, which is the same code that a popular commercial statistics package, Mint, is based on. (All this is mentioned in the deep jive article I mentioned before).
I hope this helps someone else looking for a decent statistics package for WordPress. If you find something better, please let me know and I will add it to this list!
I’m glad someone else found it useful.
I haven’t broken it down _why_ the hack works, but it does.
If you like the look of wp-slimstat, you should couple it with the spotmilk! plugin for wordpress administration; particularly, the “black” version.
Cheers
Tony
It was very useful!
Thanks for the SpotMilk recommendation. It looks great. I’d previously played around with dressing up the admin interface with the “Tiger Style Administration” plugin. It changes the top menu to a left sidebar menu; which I didn’t really like. I much prefer how SpotMilk keeps the general layout, and makes it look better. 🙂
If anyone wants to check these out, the plugins are at:
http://www.ceprix.net/archives/spotmilk-admin-theme-for-wordpress/
http://orderedlist.com/wordpress-plugins/wp-tiger-administration/
Hi Nick, thanks for the review.
Keep a close eye on FireStats, while its still lack in the features department, I am going to have all the standard features (search strings from search engines, popular pages,, ip-2-country) and some stuff you probably never seen on a stats system, like dynamic graphs.
FireStats will also integrate with other systems, allowing users that run several web applications (wordpress, gregarius, moveable type and even just a random php page) to track them all.
Hi Omry,
I will definitely keep an eye on Firestats (I’ve registered the RSS feed with my newsreader). It looks like a very impressive plugin and it was the only highly-featured plugin to install and work without any problems.
Thanks for putting in your time and contributing this plugin to the community.
Nick, glad to hear it.
I put a lot of effort into the robustness of the installation (and upgrade) process.
more work is in order however, as FireStats is not supposed to be a WordPress plugin, but a statistics system with easy integration with wordpress, and other systems in the future.
btw:
you might want to take a look at the not-yet-official FireStats trac project at http://firefang.net/projects/firestats
you can enter bug reports and enhancments requrests there.