Reactivation of the plugin is not required with this update, unless you’ve skipped the previous update (that is, if you’re using a version prior to 0.6).

After upgrading, you’ll have to re-activate this plugin! You can find more info and the download here.

Reactivation of the plugin is not required with this update, unless you’ve skipped the previous update (that is, if you’re using version 0.3).

Background

I wanted to create a redirection from that post to another post, but that doesn’t seem possible. Strange, since WordPress does have a redirection possibility; the permalink structure uses this, and my download counter uses this system also. However, adding or removing "normal" page url’s to this redirection facility is not built into the WordPress administration (or I couldn’t find it, of course).

Since I really required a redirection from /projects/wp-downloadcounter to the correct page, I’ve created this plugin for WordPress.

What does this plugin do

This plugin redirects a visitor who requests page A to page B. This visitor will be either redirected to page B, or WordPress will just show page B instead of page A. The difference between those two methods is that the first redirection is a so called external redirection, which uses the Location header and thus redirecting the browser to a new page. The second method just changes some internal variables, causing WordPress to show page A. In this case, the visitor has no idea that you’ve just redirected him.

Why should I use this?

When you’ve just been as stupid as I am ;-) Or when you want your posts to be accessible trough different URL’s. Or… (fill it out yourself).

Installation

Download the zip-file and extract the wp-redirect directory to you wp-content/plugins directory. Go to the plugins page in your wordpress administration panel, and Activate the Redirect plugin. On Activation, a table with the name [$prefix]redirect gets created. The table will not be removed when deactivating the plugin!

Management

After activation, a new page will appear in the Management tab. Choose Management -> Redirect for the redirection screen. Click on Add Redirection to add a new redirection. Enter the url which needs redirecting in the source field, and the redirected url in the destination field. Finally, choose the type of redirection.
If you’ve entered another host as the destination field, the redirection will always be externally.

Downloading

You can download the plugin here.

Note

This plugin is only tested on WordPress 2.2 and 2.3. Adam let me know that this plugin does not work with WordPress 2.0. He found another plugin doing the same thing for the WordPress 1.5 and 2.0 codebase. You can find that plugin here.

This version also adds a overview of who downloaded which file and when it was downloaded. Also the referer is stored, so you can see where your downloaders are looking for your files.

You can download the updated version at the Download Counter page. Do not forget to re-activate the plugin, to create the new database table.

I should mention statistical information is a big word for just another download counter, since that is main purpose of this plugin.

Features:

• Keeps track of the amount of downloads of a certain file.
• Keeps track of the last download time
• Allows you to reset the counter
• Allows you to add counters to both internal and external urls
• Can use fancy urls (like /downloads/file.zip)
• Can print the amount of downloads, the filesize and the last modified date in a post.

Installation

Download the zip-file and extract the wp-downloadcounter directory to you wp-content/plugins directory. Go to the plugins page in your wordpress administration panel, and Activate the Download Counter plugin. On Activation, a table with the name [$prefix]downloadstats gets created, and two options will be added. The table nor the options will be removed when deactivating the plugin! After activation, it is important that you update the Permalink Structure. You can do this at your Site administration, under Options. The reason for this update is that after Saving the Permalink Structure page, WordPress will "ask" all the plugins if they want to register some specials URL’s. The download counter plugin will register the specified download slug as a special url with WordPress. If you don’t want to do this, you’ll have to disable Pretty Links.

Management

After activating the plugin, you can manage the downloads under Management -> Downloads. Choose Add Download to add a download to the list. In the topmost editbox, you should fill in a unique name, since this name will be used in the created url. In the second editbox you should fill in the target URL. Click Save and the download is added to the list. The overview window allows you to reset the counters for a download, to edit a download (which will not reset the counters) and to delete a download. Of course, when deleting a download, only the download counter for that download will be removed, the file at the target URL will not be removed.

Using tags in your posts

When writing a post or a page, you may want to add the URL or the amount of downloads in your post. Using [ download(downloadname) ] (without the spaces) will be replaced with the download url, [ downloadcounter(downloadname) ] will be replaced with the amount of downloads, [ downloadsize(downloadname) ] will print the size of the download (in GB, MB, kB or B), [ downloadupdated(downloadname) ] will print the last modified date, using the WordPress setting you’ve specified for the date format. When creating a link, you could, for instance, use <a href="[ download(file.zip) ]">Download</a> (of course, again, without the spaces within the [] brackets).

Finally, when using downloadsize of downloadupdated, you can specify one extra argument. With downloadsize, you  can add ,false to prevent the usage of the GB, MB, kB or B postfixes. So, for example, using [ downloadsize(file.zip, false) ] will just display the size in bytes. With downloadupdated, you can enter a PHP date format string as extra argument. For example, [ downloadupdated(file.zip, d-m-Y) ] will display a date like 27-11-2008.

Retrieving download information from PHP

Since version 0.6 is it possible to get information about the downloads using PHP, so you can use this information directly in your templates or in you own plugins. Only one function is important at the moment:

download_information($download_name, $return_information = DOWNLOAD_URL | DOWNLOAD_AMOUNT)

This function will return an array with the requested information. You can specify what information to return by the argument $return_information. The file downloadcounter-options.php contains the correct define statements which can be used. Currently only URL, Amount, Size and Last Modified Date are available.

Using the code

$info = download_information(wp-downloadcounter.zip, DOWNLOAD_URL | DOWNLOAD_AMOUNT | DOWNLOAD_SIZE | DOWNLOAD_LASTMODIFIED | DOWNLOAD_LASTDOWNLOAD);
var_dump($info);

returns:

array(4) { ["url"]=> string(73) "http://bovendeur.org/downloads/wp-downloadcounter.zip" ["amount"]=> string(4) "5220" ["size"]=> int() ["lastmodified"]=> int(1240433734) }

Downloading

You can download this plugin here (size 0 B). This plugin has been downloaded 5220 times This file was last updated on 22-04-2009. If you have any comments (nice or not), please don’t be shy. Post them on this page!

Important note when upgrading

Since the database table is altered (a column for storing the user id is added) you’ll have to re-activate the plugin. Forget to do this, and NO logs will be written to the database!

If you’re using Pretty Links and are going to update your blog to WordPress 2.7, you’ll have to press the Save Changes button (without making any changes, read above why) on the Permalinks Settings page again to make this plugin work again. In my setup, I didn’t find the Permalinks page anywhere in the menu, but entering the url /wordpress/wp-admin/option-permalink.php did the trick.

Changelog

2009-04-22

• Added French translation (thanks to Laurent)
• Fixed missing strings in the pot file (also thanks to Laurent)
• The option Items per Page now also limits the amount of items seen in the Available Downloads list

2009-02-14

• Fixed a bug which prevented the statistics to update. The bug was found by a couple of users, but with the help of Chris Bergman we were able to fix this one. The problem was the PHP timelimit, which was expired after the file was sent to the client. Since this plugin writes the statistical information at the end of the script, this part of the script was never executed. Solution is to set the timelimit to 0 before the call to readfile, and reset the timelimit to the configured value after the call to readfile. Chris, thank you for your help on this one!

2009-01-13

• Fixed a bug which prevented files from being downloaded. Bug found by Kerry and Niuray, and fixed by Niuray. Original fix (and website) can be found in the comments.

2008-12-03

• Fixed some issues with PHP4
• Added DOWNLOAD_LASTMODIFIED for use with the download_information function
• Added Italian language (thanks to Gianni Diurno).

2008-12-01

• Added paging to the Downloads log (as requested by Mike, #44)
• Added logged on user to Downloads log (as requested by anon, #38)
• Added a function (download_information), which returns an array of information about the specified file (as requested by SAn, #47)
• Added [ downloadupdated(<downloadname>, <php date format>) ] as possible tag.
• Added [ downloadsize(<downloadname> ] as possible tag.

2008-10-26

• Added paging to the Available Downloads list.
• Added other options to determine the mime type of a file, including the file-command (if it’s available) and a longer list of hard-coded mime-types.

2008-03-19

• Local downloads are now handled by the script, so that the filename can be send to the browser. This should prevent the browser from download .htm or other named files.
• Changed some PHP tags which could cause errors on some configurations.

2007-07-08

• Fixed bug posted by Steve in the comments (thanx to Dave for submitting the fixes).
• Added a second table to store the ip-address, referer and date/time for each download.
• Added a configuration section to change the settings.