Track pages without a post ID (like category archives)

[dannyvankooten]

I would really like for the plugin to eventually track all different types of pages. Currently, only pages with a post ID (so any post type) will show up in the "Top Pages" table. This excludes several non-post based pages a WordPress site usually has though:

• Taxonomy archives (category archive, tag archive, custom taxonomy archives)
• Author archives
• Date archives
• Post type archives

Because Koko Analytics internally uses the post_ID so that we can easily do stuff like "get most viewed posts" or "get title", it isn't clear how we should go about supporting all these other different types of pages.

If we ditch the post ID and start storing normalized canonical paths, we lose the ability to show a post title or easily generate a list of most viewed posts (filtered by type) with the correct URL. The migration to this new structure would also be very computationally heavy...

I don't have a clear idea on how to go about this right now. Open to any suggestions that anyone reading this may have!

[msaari]

Can you replace plain post ID with an identifier that includes the resource type? post_{post_ID}, {taxonomy}_{term_ID}? Relevanssi uses an approach like this.

[dannyvankooten]

OK. I've given this some thought and experimented with trying to store things in an additional table, but the easiest approach seems to simply do the following:

Add an additional column to the koko_analytics_post_stats table of type enum which indicates what the post_id column is pointing to: either an entry in wp_posts or a normalized pathname from a new table koko_analytics_paths.

This gives us the flexibility to track anything without a post ID, regardless of what it is (so that includes 404 pages). In retrieving the stats we should take some care to translate the ID back to a proper pathname, either via get_permalink for records of type post or simply the site URL with the pathname appended for records of type path.