<h3>What Does This Do?</h3>
<p>This module provides a simple mechanism to track and view hits on content pages and/or module views.</p>
<h3>Features</h3>
<ul>
  <li>Supports multiple keys so that you can track and display views on any uniquely displayable item, either from a content page, or for a blog article, for example.</li>
  <li>Supports displaying a list of the N most frequent items <em>(pagination is not available)</em></li>
  <li>Detects repeated reloads and will not adjust the view count.</li>
  <li>Tracks user agent as well as IP address of unique visitors.</li>
  <li>Does primitive bot detection.</li>
  <li>Allows IP or browser agent exclusion so that you can exclude web crawlers from the counting.</li>
</ul>
<h3>How Do I Use It</h3>
<p>It is really simple, just place this string somewhere in your page template or content:{HitCounter}.  By default, if no additional parameters are supplied hits will be tracked for the page id that this tag appears on.  Additionally, it will output the number of unique hits.  You could surround this output with some text.</p>
<p>For using this module in a module detail template you need to manually specify enough unique keys for the hitcounter to uniquely identify the article.  Typically I would use something like {HitCounter key1=&quot;news&quot; key2=\$entry->id}.</p>
<p>By default, the module outputs the number of unique views to that item.  You can hide this output by using the assign parameter (see the cms_module tag).  You can also change the output to view the number of unique hosts that have viewed the item by using the opt=hosts optional parameter.</p>
<h3>Viewing Popular Items:</h3>
<p>This module provides the ability to display a sorted list of the popular pages, or module records (for compatible modules).<p>
<pre><code>{HitCounter action=popular [key1=string [key2=string]] [limit=number] [popular_template=string]</code></pre>
<p><strong>Note:</strong> In order to use the &quot;popular&quot; action on module records, the module must implement a LinkDefinitionGenerator class to create LinkDefinition objects that are suitable for the module and the current request.</p>
<p>Known Items that are Compatible with the &quot;popular&quot; action:</p>
<ul>
  <li>Page: <em>(default)</em>
    <p>Create links to content pages.</p>
  </li>
  <li>CompanyDirectory:
    <p>Create links to CompanyDirectory items.</p>
  </li>
</ul>
<h3>Support</h3>
<p>This module does not include commercial support. However, there are a number of resources available to help you with it:</p>
<ul>
<li>For the latest version of this module, FAQs, or to file a Bug Report or buy commercial support, please visit calguy's
module homepage at <a href="http://calguy1000.com">calguy1000.com</a>.</li>
<li>Additional discussion of this module may also be found in the <a href="http://forum.cmsmadesimple.org">CMS Made Simple Forums</a>.</li>
<li>The author, calguy1000, can often be found in the <a href="irc://irc.freenode.net/#cms">CMS IRC Channel</a>.</li>
<li>Lastly, you may have some success emailing the author directly.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Copyright and License</h3>
<p>Copyright &copy; 2008, Robert Campbel <a href="mailto:calguy1000@cmsmadesimple.org">&lt;calguy1000@cmsmadesimple.org&gt;</a>. All Rights Are Reserved.</p>
<p>This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.</p>
<p>However, as a special exception to the GPL, this software is distributed
as an addon module to CMS Made Simple.  You may not use this software
in any Non GPL version of CMS Made simple, or in any version of CMS
Made simple that does not indicate clearly and obviously in its admin
section that the site was built with CMS Made simple.</p>
<p>This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA
Or read it <a href="http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#GPL">online</a></p>
