WordPress – Plugin To Keep Track Of Visitors

I understand there are very many plugins available for WordPress that help keep track of a variety of stats. This one, wp-visitors, is simple and light-weight. Myself and couple friends (Adam & Karen and Tim Obermann) have been using it without any trouble – in some form or the other – for over a year now. I am sure this plugin will see further updates – a few bells and whistles (geographical resolution of IP address), etc. As with all WordPress hosted plugins, this too is released under GPL. So, if you like it and like to make it better, please be my guest 🙂

Where To Get It?

The plugin, compatible with and tested up to 2.6.5, will be hosted on WordPress.org and can be downloaded from the plugins page.

Installation

  1. Unzip wp-visitors.zip
  2. This should result in a folder called wp-visitors
  3. Upload wp-visitors to /wp-content/plugins folder in your blog
  4. Activate it
  5. If all goes well, plugin should start recording the hits/page-loads
  6. See the visitor details in Dashboard » Visitor Details

Screenshot

wp-visitors

Visitor Details – click on the image to see bigger version

FAQs

  1. I don’t like the way visitor details are displayed. Can I change it to meet my fantasies?Yes. If you know basic HTML and some PHP, you should be able to change it.
  2. What does the IP address link to in visitor details?It links to the ARIN WHOIS database and provides some more information that you my (not) find useful.
  3. #2 sounds fine. But I am a click-conservationalist. I want more information by default!Geographical resolution of IP address will be included in a subsequent update.
  4. It only says #### hits so far and following are recorded today. What if I want to check my visitors from some other day?Very valid question. Like #3, this feature will also be added in a subsequent update.

2008.12.24 – version 1.1

(Approximate) Geographical resolution of IP address added.


wp-visitors

2009.02.11 – version 1.2

This version fixes the errors of the kind, as reported earlier by Douglas Hill, Stefboy and several others.

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/xxxxxxx/public_html/wordcurrents/wp-content/plugins/wp-visitors/wp-visitors.php:12) in /home/xxxxxx/public_html/wordcurrents/wp-login.php on line 255

84 Replies to “WordPress – Plugin To Keep Track Of Visitors”

  1. Cool, G. Gonna try it out. Agree with Kyle. Seeing how many times someone has been stalking, I mean, visiting your site could be useful. Also a button that then sends a flaming bag of dog poop to their doorstep. I realize this feature might not be available until at LEAST WordPress V.3…

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  4. I am using WP 2.7

    I had to disable wp-visitors because it was blocking my attempts to install other plugins and, eventually, to access my dashboard. Instead, I was receiving an error message like this:

    Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/xxxxxxx/public_html/wordcurrents/wp-content/plugins/wp-visitors/wp-visitors.php:12) in /home/xxxxxx/public_html/wordcurrents/wp-login.php on line 255

    I like the concept of wp-visitors, because many stats services carry a high load overhead, and this one does not seem to have much of that problem, but I would like to work without locking me out. Any thoughts?

    1. @Douglas:
      I have seen that error in few WP installations. I am currently looking into what exactly is causing this problem and will hopefully resolve it by next update/release.

      Apologies for this inconvenience.

    2. This exception always happens when i disable/enable one of plugins. Wish it helps your debugging.

      Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /raid/vhost/jdev.tw/www/journal/wp-content/plugins/wp-visitors/wp-visitors.php:12) in /raid/vhost/jdev.tw/www/journal/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 850

  5. When I make ANY change at the blog it displays me the following error:
    Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at C:\Documents and Settings\Stefan.STEFBOY\Desktop\www\wp-content\plugins\wp-visitors\wp-visitors.php:12) in C:\Documents and Settings\Stefan.STEFBOY\Desktop\www\wp-includes\pluggable.php on line 850

  6. After upgrading to WP 2.7 I was unable to publish new posts until I deactivated WP-Visitors 1.0. WP just kept saying that the “edit failed, please try again” even with a new post.

  7. The idea is great, but with WP 2.7 I was unable to use it at all.. It causes errors, does not want to create the table into the database… may be it needs some more development. Let me know if I can help for improving this plugin.
    Regards

    1. @Kamen:
      I have noticed the problem with a specific type of hosts – out of nearly 1000 instances so far, this problem has surfaced in about 20-25 of them. I am currently looking into what exactly is causing this error and will include the fix in next upgrade 🙂

  8. Hi there,

    I absolutely love the potential of this plugin so much so that I would really like to get involved with its production. If you’re looking for help or even ideas I would really like to have a chat with you. I’d love to have something where you can ‘spy’ on your members to see which pages they’ve visited – based on usernames, rather than IP’s. I’d also like to get involved with the GeoLocation. Please do get in touch and thanks so much for the work on this plugin so far – it’s fantastic!

  9. I had problems with this and had to disable it. I have a blog hosted at GoDaddy, WP v 2.7. I was unable to post. TinyMCE would just fail. LiveWriter would error out with some complaints in the log about an invalid response from the xmlrpc server. Once I disabled this, it worked fine.

    It also did not appear to initialize properly, as it never displayed any information.

    1. Is it possible to add a option page with timezone option. For example, the page allows me to choice the timezone GMT+8 for Hong Kong, China. (Websphere also has this option, if the new version can use it directly would be better), then the result page is shows the logging datetime in my selected timezone. I think it would be better to store the datetime in GMT+0, and shows the datetime in selected timezone dynamically.

  10. @Tracey,

    I would love to help but please let me know if you got any kind of error message. Without that, I can only guess that the error is due to some kind of clash between the plugins you have installed.

  11. Hi!

    Can I use this plugin in order to see if some of my visitors ar just trying to cheat my statistic system by changing their ip address?
    I have a contest on my blog and users have this photo galleries. The most visited one, will win. But I think that some of them have so many visits that they might just using some tricks in order to gather more votes.

    Any idea?

  12. @Catalin:

    The plugin will display stats only after you get some hits on your blog posts/pages. As for your other question, you can use this plugin to see how many people visited from a given IP address. Although that feature is not part of the current version, it’s an important part of the next release (v1.3).

    You can continue to use the current version to gather stats/information and with v1.3, you can easily sift through them to get what you are looking for.

  13. I would like to see the ability to exclude some IP addresses from the visitor records (your own IP for example) and the link to generate the whois from the correct server I seem to remember a page that gets updated approx monthly at http://iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-address-space.xml that lists the 255 value of the first byte of a 32bit IPv4 and lists the allocations to the 5 public whois servers ARIN, RIPE, APNIC, LACNIC & AFRINIC NCCs/RiRs and this could be processed monthly to derive a table to generate a better set of whois queries than the current one to ARIN

  14. Thanks for a great plugin. I am new to this so please bear with me. Is there a settings page where I can control the numbers of entries that are stored in the history? Otherwise, all the recorded data will just grow and grow won’t it?

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  16. Hi This is a nice plug-in. thanx for it. i would like to make fewsuggestions for future improvements.

    1. an option to exclude logged in users
    2. group data by ip address. this can easily identify the same user activity

    i’m waiting for your next update 🙂

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