Cleverwise phpBB Statistics

This plugin will check your phpBB board and grab vital statistics such as total members, total threads, total posts, newest member, and last post and display that information on your WordPress site. phpBB can even be on another site, server, and datacenter. You have total control over which statistics are displayed. The theme is totally customizable and its easy to modify to match your design concept.

You are able to pull statistics from up to three (3) boards and display them on your WordPress powered site. Each board may have its own refresh setting. So if you have a busy board you may update its information more frequently than one that isn’t so heavily traveled.

Why a refresh interval? When loading statistics from your phpBB install a web query is required to grab the information. This makes sense, right? Well this action is taxing because another system must be contacted and possibly another datacenter too. So the data collected from your board(s) is stored in your local WordPress database. Thus between refresh periods the phpBB statistics are loaded from your site’s database, which makes this process more optimized for performance. However there are two other important optimization features.

First when the refresh period has lapsed and its time for new information only when the next page load occurs will this plugin contact phpBB. So if you have a 15 minute refresh period and your site gets no visitors for 32 minutes then at that time the plugin will grab the updated information and start a new 15 minute count down. After all why grab the information when no one is visiting the site. Yes, if you are wondering, spiders and bots count as visitors and thus new information will be pulled if they are the visitor.

Second when it comes time to update the board information this plugin will not wait long for phpBB to respond. In fact it only waits up to two seconds. If the board can’t be contacted in that time due to a network issue, slow server, or server is down the last saved statistics are displayed. Cleverwise phpBB Statistics will then automatically keep trying with every page load to update the information. So as you can see this plugin is designed to reduce the amount of resources required to accomplish the goal at hand.

It should be noted that there are two required parts to this setup. First is, obviously, this very plugin. The second involves some important files that allow this plugin to communicate with your phpBB install(s) called the wpapi. You see this system talks to the wpapi, that is uploaded to your phpBB styles directory, and that is what gathers the actual information from your phpBB(s). Now there are two important settings in the wpapi.

First is a secret key, that you create/make up, which keeps unauthorized sources from grabbing your data. Second is an optional setting that allows you to direct the wpapi system to omit specific forum(s) when looking for the latest post. Why this feature? Well if you have a hidden forum on your phpBB board you probably don’t want any topics from it displayed in the last post to your board do you? Nope.

Now you are wondering where do you get this wpapi? The download link is posted in the “Help Guide” in this plugin. So once you have installed this plugin simply download those key files and follow the instructions in the “Help Guide”.

Language Support: Should work for all languages that use the A-Z alphabet. The default language to display the statistics is in English but is easily changeable into any language.

Live Site Preview: Want to see this plugin in action on a real live site? ArmadaFleetCommand.com and look in the right sidebar.

Shameless Promotion: See other Cleverwise WordPress Directory Plugins

Thanks for looking at the Cleverwise Plugin Series! To help out the community reviews and comments are highly encouraged. If you can’t leave a good review I would greatly appreciate opening a support thread before hand to see if I can address your concern(s). Enjoy!