Mine the Harvest

I’ve been using a stats plugin for Worpress and it has done a good enough job, but I recently found myself looking for a stats reporting plugin for my Wiki as well. I have added a lot of articles over the last year and was curious to see exactly how many hits it gets.

Googling around quickly led me to Firestats. What a wonderful product. It allows you to centrally managed stats from several applications such as MediaWiki, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc. and manage multiple instances of these very easily. See their page on multiple sites for more information. Additionally you can use this on any generic PHP page, which is a great feature.

The stand alone installer worked extremely well. After Firestats is installed you can follow the directions on how to add a database and then use the plugins for a variety of applications. Follow the instructions for these plugins very carefully and before you know it you will have stats pages for all your separate sites you wish to monitor.

The Firestats interface is quite nice, with graphical representations for visitors browser types, OSes, country flags for their origin IP, etc. The interface is quite nice.

Here are a few screen shots, but it really is far more impressive that these show. This one shows the hits page, with icons for the visitors browers, OS and country along with the Goolge or other referring link. Very geeky undoubtedly.

This one shows the categories of browsers and versions. There are also categories for OS versions and countries too:

If you are looking for stats software for you site, I would highly recommend this. It seems quite versitle. I am going to look into and see if there are extended graphing and reporting capabilities, but all the data is just stored in a MySQL database, so you can easily do with it as you will.