Niels Hartvig's umbraco blog

I've had some downtime moving server, so the 25% discount coupon "earlystat" will work throughout the weekend. So go place an order, use "earlystat" as a coupon code and get your copy cheap. It'll expire monday at 24.00 GMT+1

umbracoStats is out - go place your order...

You can apply filters in the premium version of umbracoStats to your reports. You can filter on sections of your site, a Document Type or a combination of those two:



This is quite handy if you have multiple websites using root nodes, and only want a stat report for one of the sites - say the English version. You can also use Document Type filters to monitor "News" items (or another type) across the whole site.

For developers you can create your own filters, by implementing a ISearchFilter interface (I'll get back to this in a future post with full sample code). This means that you can extend the functionality of umbracoStats to display advanced reports. The premium version also supports running reports on external databases and combining those two functionalities gives you endless posibilities for easy and beautiful stats...

Here's what you see when you first click the stats icon in the lower left corner - the umbracoStats dashboard:

It has six sparklines in the top for a fast look at how your site has performed the last 24 hours, the last month and the last year. Simple, but very easy and fast to see if you had any peeks since last time. It also has direct links to all the reports as well as aggregated info from the umbracoStats blog where I'll share tips and tricks in the future...

btw: This is also the first time the wonderful umbracoStats logo has been revealed. It's made by Hudson Maul who also did the new umbraco identity. I just love that guy!

One of the goals with the (non-)architecture of umbracoStats where to make it possible to do "tracking-mashups" in terms of making umbracoStats do things that wasn't originally the purpose.

Yesterday I discovered one way of doing that, by "hacking" (in the positive meaning) the newsletter for tracking links in my outlook signature :-)

So here's an easy 3 step guide for doing that!

1. Create a page on your website where umbracoStats is installed.

Name it something like "E-mail signature tracking" or whatever make sense for you. Remember to create it in a part of your website that aren't displayed or hide it in the navigation.

Hover over the new document in the tree part of umbraco, and look in the footer; this will display "javascript:openContent(xxxx)". Now the xxxx number is the id of your new place and we'll need this for the next step:

Step 2: Add tracking to the signature link

Edit your e-mail signature and add this to the link: "umbNl=xxxx" where xxxx is the id of the page in step 1 (you can often have separate link and linktext, so the confusing tracking code aren't displayed as a part of the visible link).

Step 3: Start tracking :-)
That's it. The moment people start clicking the link it will be visible in umbracoStats and you can monitor if the signature-link has any effect:

(as you can see I haven't sent enough e-mails the past 24 hours :-))

A step further: Not only for e-mail signatures
This technique is not limited to e-mail signatures, but can be used in many other places. Happy stat'ing

umbracoStats is not only about fancy 3d reports, it's also a tool that can be used to display information on your website. The Standard and Premium versions offers a nice and simple api (in the umbraco.stats.Businesslogic.Library namespace) to get stat information:

• public static SortedList GetMostPopular(int NumberOfItems, DateTime StartDate, DateTime EndDate)
• public static SortedList GetMostPopular(int ParentId, int NumberOfItems, DateTime StartDate, DateTime EndDate)
• public static SortedList GetMostPopular(umbraco.cms.businesslogic.web.DocumentType DocumentType, int NumberOfItems, DateTime StartDate, DateTime EndDate)
• public static SortedList GetMostPopular(int[] DocumentTypes, int NumberOfItems, DateTime StartDate, DateTime EndDate)
• public static SortedList GetMostPopular(int[] DocumentTypes, int ParentId, bool Deep, int NumberOfItems, DateTime StartDate, DateTime EndDate)

All of these methods returns a SortedList of StatItem objects containing info on id, name and number of visits. As you can see you can filter these lists by parentids, document types and dates.

Here's a simple sample (requires a reference made to the umbraco.stat dll):

// Get the ten most popular pages from the whole website last week as an ordered html list and append it to a literal control SortedList results;

results = umbracoStat.Businesslogic.Library.GetMostPopular(-1, 10, DateTime.Now.AddWeeks(-1), DateTime.Now);

// Loop through results and display as an orderedList
IDictionaryEnumerator ide = results.GetEnumerator();
System.Text.StringBuilder sb = new System.Text.StringBuilder();
sb.Append("<ol>");
while (ide.MoveNext())
{
 umbracoStat.Businesslogic.StatItem statItem = (umbracoStat.Businesslogic.StatItem) ide.Value;

 sb.Append("<li><a href=\"" + umbraco.library.NiceUrl(statItem.Id) + "\">" + statItem.Name + "</a>: " + statItem.Hits + "</li>\n\r");
}

sb.Append("</ol>");
LiteralStatList.Text = sb.ToString();

umbracoStats Standard and Premium editions also includes e-mail tracking. When using the build-in massmailer of umbraco you can get instant info on which links are clicked in the mail and how fast people respond to the email:


Click for large version

Any e-mail sent appear in the stat tree the moment stat data is available, and as any other report in umbracoStats, you can set report dates as well.

Think about this; Full and unlimited e-mail campaign software + tracking via umbraco for just $249!

umbracoStats makes it easy to track a lot of info on visitors and despite all the unique features like tracking logged in users on the site and much more, this post will feature a classic; tracking visitors by country:

Click for large image

This feature is for all versions of umbracoStats (except the light version). You can decide the top number of countries to be displayed and choose to see them in either pie chart or bar format. IP-databases are updated every day, and data is very fast accessed by a central webservice, keeping your installation at a minimum without any maintaince.

Darrens combination of a blog featuring posts on hot asian food restaurants and umbraco makes this a sure hit in my RSS Reader :-)

It's a small one - really a tiny one, but it's also the small details that makes the whole product. umbracoStats features customizable charts colors, and an additional palette for prints.

So not only can you change the chart palette if you like, but the same report can have the good looks both when you present on screen, as well as when it's printed in B/W or on a printer that sucks in shades of blue: