WordPress Statistics Plugin – BAStats

I’ve been looking for quite a while to find a good statistics package that could give me an idea of what is going on on the site over and above the default Analog stats that my web provider provides.

Tonight I came across the beta version of BAStats, by Owen Winkler. The package is a WordPress plugin and as such was installed and functional in minutes.

I’ll have to figure out whether it winds up being useful, but the amount of data it collects for the amount of effort I had to put into installing it is definitely worth it. Currently, through my administration panel I can report on the following metrics:

  • Top Page Hits
  • Top Hosts
  • Top Referring Pages
  • Top Operating Systems
  • Top User Agents
  • Top Search Phrases
  • Recent Page Hits
  • Recent Hosts
  • Recent Referring Pages
  • Recent Operating Systems
  • Recent User Agents
  • Recent Search Phrases
  • Graph Top 5 Page Hits – Segmented
  • Graph Top Page Hits

I don’t have enough data to see what the last two items do, but it looks like I now have quite a bit of information at my fingertips. I’m hoping this stuff is more intelligible than trying to sift through the analog stats. Time will tell. Right now all I see is crawlers.

Update

I was receiving some errors in the control panel and a data type error on the main page. To remove these messages, I did the following:

In the file BAStats_options.php, change the function check_option to look like the following:

function check_option($opt)
{
$settings = get_settings('bas_options');
if (!$settings) { $settings = array(); }
if(in_array($opt, $settings)) echo ' checked="checked"';
}

At line 115 , change the following code

if(in_array('log_spam', $options) && in_array('referer_spam', $settings))
{

to the following:

if(!is_array($options))$options = array();
if(!is_array($settings))$settings = array();
if(in_array('log_spam', $options) && in_array('referer_spam', $settings))
{

These changes should fix the errors you are receiving.