Wordpress: Counter for page views to be inserted in a different page - wordpress

Question

I have been looking for a plugin in wordpress that allows me to insert a page view counter in a different page: I´ll explain;
In page A I have buttom with a contact form to vote a video (it is a video contest). This contact form sends the voter an email with a link to page B so that they can validate their email this way. Every visit to page B will be counted as a vote.
The thing is that I want to count the number times that page B is accessed to show it in page A (to show the number of votes next to the video).
It seems pretty straightforward but I can´t find an easy way to do this. Do you think you could help me?
Thanks!
Guzmán

Answer 1

If a very small number of people will access the page you can just store a value in WordPress and add to it each time. If you expect a lot of users on the page at once you may need a more complex method.
For a lightly trafficed page, with the risk that some visits might not be counted you could leverage the post meta and simply store a counter variable. If two people viewed the page at the same time they could get the same value for the counter variable and so they would not properly increment the variable.
You could add this to the template for the page in question:
$vcount = get_post_meta($post->ID, "view_counter");
add_post_meta($post->ID, "view_counter", $vcount+1, true);
So two people accessing the page would end up with equal $vcount variables. To display the count you'd just need the post id for the post you saved the meta to: print get_post_meta(<POSTIDHERE>, "view_counter", true);
If you need to have a more robust solution, you'd want to store a unique value for each visitor and then to report the total you would count the values and display it. So you could store the visitor's IP address as a multi-value meta:
add_post_meta($post->ID, "view_counter", $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'], false);
Then to display the count you'd need to count the number of post meta values stored with the view_counter key:
$ips = get_post_meta(<POSTIDHERE>, "view_counter", false);
$views = count($ips);
print "Total views: $views";
This is just a sample solution, you should probably check to see if an IP already exists and consider throttling individual IPs. You could also risk filling your database if you have a small shared server unless you write some additional code to keep this from being abused since it adds data to your database on every page view. Finally this will not work correctly if you have any type of caching enabled.
Depending on the plugin that you are using for your contact form you may also be able to report the number of times that the contact form was submitted by querying the database directly.
For more information see the documentation for add_post_meta and get_post_meta
(disclaimer, code written from memory and documentation, not tested)