One of the websites based on Joomla, that I’m managing, had to have the option to show a Visitors Counter on the page bottom.
I did some research online to check for some Joomla plugins that are capable of aiming my Joomla installation with the Visitor Counter feature.
There are a couple of plugins available out there that are able to provide a Joomla installation with a Web Counter, however I’ll just mention the few which I have tested myself.
The ones I’ve tested myself are;
1. VCNT
2. Count your Visitors
3. Cool Hits Counter
and finally the one that I really liked the most:
4. VINAORA
All the prior 3 aforementioned VCNT, Count your Visitors and Cool Hits Counter, are actually working right after installation. I haven’t had the time to test them thoroughfully but from a first look they appear to be counting the visitors.
The Count your visitors – joomla plugin’s download main page was in German with no option to revert to English, so that wasn’t nice.
Though the plugin seems to work fine after just downloaded and installed and configured from
Extensions -> Module Manager
The configuration options for Count your visitors are quite obscure but if you’re a looking for a really simple way to count your Joomla based website visitors it might be a good choice. The plugin is based on the initial Joomla module called Statistics.
By the way I’ve read some reports online that actually Joomla 1.5 also includes some kind of minimal integrated web counter embedded in itself throughout the Joomla Statistics module .
However I personally couldn’t really follow the methods describe to take advantage of the Joomla install integrated Statistics module, however if somebody has already succeeded in using the Statistics default joomla module I’ll be glad, if he shares with me.
I’ve found the VCNT visitor statistics plugin a handy one, but this module had this major problem that the VCNT 1.5 text which was appearing as a heading before the statistics was hard to wipe out of my web page, so eventually I got pissed of and thought and tested the Cool Hits Counter.
The Cool Hits Counter is actually a simplistic module which presents a counter about visitors on the web site in numeric digit numbers.
These module uses the integrated Joomla 1.5 module mod_stats the only difference is the support for numeric digit numbers.
As I’ve said none of the above modules wasn’t flexible enough and therefore wasn’t what I was looking for, thus I decided to use my installed VINAORA Joomla web(users) counter plugin.
The VINAORA is actually quite straight foward to configure, right after installation to start with the configuration I had to navigate to:
Extension -> Module Manager -> Vinaora Visitors Counter -> Module Parameters
Since I wanted just a simple counter without any external statistics I personally prefered using Vinaora’s counter with the optionsDisplay Mode: Simple as well as the Zero-Statistics turned on to (Yes)
Some of the other options I found to be best matching my desires for the Visitors Counter was:
Show Title: No and Position: Left
Now I had this shiny visitors statistics in my Joomla installation but there was the annoying Link in my Visitors Counter appearing on the page, thus in order to remove the default link Visitors Counter which was pointing to the VINAORA’s web page, I had to edit the file:
modules/mod_vvisit_counter/tmpl/default.php located in my Joomla Document Root directory.
First I’ve edited the code on line 21 where I’ve removed out the Vinaora string since I didn’t wanted any reference to Vinaora to occur in my Joomla HTML code.
In line 162 in the code:
$html .= ….
By removing it I’ve completed scraped out the annoying references to VINAORA and their link to http://vinaora.com website and thus made the Visitors counter a look a bit more professional.
Now the counter is working with a graphical numeric digits and everything is just fine with my Web counter Joomla counter thanks to VINAORA 🙂
