PHP Counter

PHPCounter is a simple yet effective PHP hit counter which displays result in a graphical manner (with images). It uses flat-text database so no SQL databases are necessary. It can count hits for multiple pages of your website or even websites on other servers. To prevent others taking advantage of your script a HTTP referer validation has been included as an option.

This PHP counter may show hit counts in the following styles:

This tutorial includes the following section:

• Download & Installation
  Download PHP counter and installation instructions
• Selecting the style of PHP Counter
  How to select existed counter styles which come along with package.
• Limit domains accessing Counter
  Add or limit domains accessing counter script.
• Adding your own styles to the counter
How to add your own counter images.

• Improvement: add session control on PHP counter
  How to use session variable to corrent the drawback of this counter.
• TroubleShooting
  Why my PHP counter doesn't work?

Download

The PHP Counter is downloadable here. It requires PHP 4 or higher.

Installation

• Open file graphcount.php in your favorite PLAIN TEXT editor (like Notepad or Wordpad on Windows systems, DO NOT use MS Word or similar editor), scroll down to where it says "SETUP YOUR COUNTER" and set these variables:

$base_url - Set this to the URL of the folder where you will install PHPGcount. Make sure you add a "/" at the end of the folder URL.

EXAMPLE (let's say you want to install the counter in a folder called "phpgcount")
Correct: http://www.yourdomain.com/phpgcount/
Wrong: http://www.yourdomain.com/phpgcount

NOTE: For the first installation (to get it up and running as easy as possible) you may leave other variables (displayed below) as they are set by default.

$default_style - Default style of the images displayed by the counter. More info on styles further down.

$default_ext - Default image extension of your counter. If your default style consists of .jpeg images set it to "jpeg", if from .gif leave as it is etc.
NOTE: If you want to use any style that comes with PHPGcount by default, you should leave this variable set to "gif".

$check_referer - Enable referer validation (more inf further down).

$referers - Domains that are allowed to use the counter.

Save and close the graphcount.php file.

• Upload graphcount.php file into a folder in your public directory (where the rest of your website is; usually "public_html", "www" or "site").
  Example: /public_html/phpgcount
  Corresponding URL: http://www.yourdomain.com/phpgcount/graphcount.php
  
• Upload the "styles" folder to the same directory.
  Example: public_html/phpgcount/styles
  Corresponding URL: http://www.yourdomain.com/phpgcount/styles
  
• Within the phpgcount folder create a new folder called "logs" (on many servers names are cassensitive). Make sure this folder is world-writable (on UNIX servers issue command CHMOD 777 (rwx-rwx-rwx))
  Example: public_html/graphcount/logs
  Corresponding URL: http://www.yourdomain.com/phpgcount/logs
  
• Now to make your counter work just use this piece of code on your site:

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="Javascript" SRC="http://www.domain.com/phpgcount/graphcount.php?page=PAGENAME"><!--
//--></SCRIPT>

Change the SRC parameter accordingly (to your graphcount.php URL)! Change PAGENAME to a unique name for each page you want track hits on (use numbers and letter only, no spaces or other chars).
Example:
On index.html you would use http://www.domain.com/phpgcount/graphcount.php?page=index
On someotherpage.html you would use http://www.domain.com/phpgcount/graphcount.php?page=otherpage
etc...

Try this and make sure your counter work before configuring it any more with options discussed below.