smd_lately

List the most recent articles viewed by the current visitor or, alternatively, all visitors. Can also order by popularity (most viewed).

Features

• List recently viewed articles: useful on product pages or in shopping cart
• Show a list of the most popular articles
• Limit either list by section or arbitrary value (ip, host, page, referer) if you wish
• Uses the visitor logs
• Automatically filters out article list pages, category, author or search visits

Author / credits

Stef Dawson.

Installation / Uninstallation

Requires Logging to be set to All hits (will issue a warning of not)

Download the plugin from either textpattern.org, or the software page, paste the code into the TXP Admin -> Plugins pane, install and enable the plugin. Visit the forum thread for more info or to report on the success or otherwise of the plugin.

To uninstall, simply delete from the Admin -> Plugins page.

<txp:smd_lately>

Place this tag anywhere you wish to display a list of recently viewed articles. The tag may be used as a single tag (with an optional form) or as a container. Inside the form/container you can use any standard article tags — <txp:title />, <txp:excerpt />, <txp:posted />, etc — to format the list however you like. Without either a form or a container, the plugin displays a hyperlinked title to the article.

The following attributes can be used to modify the plugin’s output:

Attributes

Log filtering and sort order attributes

• by : use by="" or by="SMD_ALL" to view the most recent articles by all site visitors. By default (i.e. if the attribute is omitted) the plugin only shows the recent articles viewed by the current visitor
• section : choose to show articles only from this list of sections. Default: unset (i.e. from all sections). Note that you must be using either messy mode or a permlink mode with /section in it to filter by section
• show_current : Display the article being viewed in the list: 1=Yes; 0=No. Ignored if in an article_list page. Default: 0
• include : ensure that log file entries that match this set of criteria are included in the list. This attribute takes up to 3 parameters, separated by param_delim (default is the colon).
  • First is the name of a field to match against. Choose from ip (the default), host, page or refer
  • Second is an optional parameter to indicate whether the match is a regular expression, wild or an exact match. Use regex if you wish this match to be considered as a regular expression, specify like if you want to check if the text is a simple ‘wild’ match (it’s similar to, but quicker than, a regex), or omit the parameter entirely if you want an ‘exact match’ to be considered
  • Finally, specify the text you want to match with that field. For example, include="host:like:www.domain.com" would only include results that had www.domain.com somewhere in their host name. Using include="192.168.2.200" would show pages from any internal meddling you may have done on your local XAMPP server. Note that if you omit parameters 1 and 2, the plugin uses the defaults
• exclude : ensure that log file entries that match this set of criteria are not included in the list. Use this in the same manner as include
• from : date / time stamp (written in English) of the earliest date to consider in the logs. You may specify ?month and/or ?year to have the plugin replace it with the current month/year. Default: unset
• to : date / time stamp (written in English) of the most recent date to consider in the logs. You may specify ?month and/or ?year to have the plugin replace it with the current month/year. Default: current time
• within : date offset (written in English) which specifies a time window in which you are interested. For example within="36 hours" would show results from the last 36 hours. If you specify a to date, the value of within is subtracted from it. If you specify a from date, the value of within is added to it. If you specify both from and to, the offset is calculated relative to the to attribute. Default: unset

• sort : order the list by either time, or popularity. Add asc or desc to choose ascending or descending sort order. Default: time desc
• limit : show this many items in the list. 0 = unlimited. Default: 10

Article filter attributes

• status : Only articles with one of these listed status values are displayed in the list. Default: 4 (live)
• time : If an article in the log has its posted timestamp in the time period indicated in this attribute, it will be displayed. Choose from any, future or past (the default). Leaving this at its default prevents any future-dated articles that you may be previewing from showing up in the list

Display attributes

• wraptag : the (X)HTML tag, without its brackets, to wrap the list with. Default: unset
• class : the CSS class name to apply to the wraptag. Default: smd_lately
• break : the (X)HTML tag, without its brackets, to wrap each item with. Default: br
• label : the label text to add to the top of the list. Default: unset
• labeltag : the (X)HTML tag, without its brackets, to wrap the label with. Default: unset

Plugin configuration attributes

• form : if you prefer to use a form instead of the container to hold your markup and tags, specify it here. Default: unset
• delim : the delimiter to use between items in attribute lists (section, include, exclude, status). Default: comma
• param_delim : the delimiter to use between parameters inside an attribute (include, exclude). Default: colon

Replacement variables

In addition to regular TXP article tags, you may employ any of the following codes in your form/container to display the corresponding value:

• {smd_lately_count} : the number of times the article has been accessed
• {smd_lately_fulldate} : the article’s last access date stamp
• {smd_lately_date} : the article’s last access date
• {smd_lately_date_year} : the article’s last access year
• {smd_lately_date_month} : the article’s last access month (number)
• {smd_lately_date_monthname} : the article’s last access month (full name)
• {smd_lately_date_day} : the article’s last access day (number)
• {smd_lately_date_dayname} : the article’s last access day (full name)
• {smd_lately_time} : the article’s last access time stamp
• {smd_lately_time_hour} : the article’s last access hour
• {smd_lately_time_minute} : the article’s last access minute
• {smd_lately_time_second} : the article’s last access second

Caveats

Since the plugin uses the TXP logs you need to make sure they are being used (Admin->Basic Prefs). It also means that any visitors using an anonymising proxy will get spurious (or no) results. Their loss.

Examples

Example 1: recent article list for current visitor

<txp:smd_lately />

Example 2: recent articles for all visitors

<txp:smd_lately by="" section="archive, about" />

Only shows the articles viewed from the ‘archive’ and ‘about’ sections.

Example 3: most popular articles across the site

<txp:smd_lately by="" sort="popularity"  />

Without using the by attribute, this would give the most popular articles for the current visitor — probably not what you want!

Example 4: tag as a container

<txp:smd_lately by=""
     wraptag="ul" break="li" limit="6">
   <txp:permlink><txp:title /></txp:permlink> [{smd_lately_count}]<br />
   <txp:posted /> by <txp:author />
</txp:smd_lately>

Shows the 6 most recent articles accessed by any site visitor. The unordered list output contains a permlinked title, the date the article was posted and the article’s author.

Example 5: filtering by host

<txp:smd_lately by=""
     wraptag="ul" break="li" limit="6"
     exclude="host:id3456-bt.custref.com, refer:">
   <txp:permlink><txp:title /></txp:permlink> [{smd_lately_count}]<br />
</txp:smd_lately>

Shows only records that have some referer information (i.e. we are excluding entries where refer = empty) and those that have NOT been accessed via the unique hostname given to you by your ISP — assuming id3456-bt.custref.com shows up in the ‘host’ column whenever you access a TXP article.

If you adjusted the exclude attribute to read exclude="host:like:bt.custref" then any log entries with bt.custref in them would be excluded from consideration.

Example 6: filtering by time range

<txp:smd_lately by=""
     wraptag="ul" break="li"
     from="?year-?month-01">
   <txp:permlink><txp:title /></txp:permlink> [{smd_lately_count}]<br />
</txp:smd_lately>

Shows only the hits generated from the first day of the current month until now. The recent list will thus ‘reset’ on the 1st of every month.

If you removed the from attribute and used within="30 days" you would instead see a ‘rolling’ total of the hits in the previous 30 days (you could also use within="1 month" to get roughly the same result).

Changelog

23 Jul 09 | 0.1 | Initial release
24 Jul 09 | 0.11 | Made backwards compatible with TXP 4.0.8
10 Aug 09 | 0.12 | Never assume what remains in the filtered URL is actually an article
11 Sep 09 | 0.13 | Added replacement vars
19 Feb 10 | 0.2 | Added status, time, include, exclude, delim, and param_delim ; article list now filtered by time="past" and status="4" by default
10 May 10 | 0.21 | Added from, to and within (thanks the_ghost) ; added like matching ; removed some power-hungry REGEXP operators in favour of LIKE to improve performance
28 May 10 | 0.22 | Fixed default class attribute and removed trailing slash in log pages (thanks maniqui)