Add View Counter plugin (OJS 3.4 and 3.5)

[edersotto]

New plugin: View Counter

Adds a gallery entry for View Counter (generic, product viewcounter).

• What it does: shows each article's abstract views and downloads (sum of galleys),
  discreetly next to the title on the summary lists and on the article landing page;
  configurable per journal. On OJS 3.5 the counts are computed via the statistics service
  with safe fallbacks.
• Repository: https://github.com/OJSBR/viewcounter (GPL-3.0)
• Maintainer: OJSBR (STNT Tecnologia da Informação LTDA)
• Releases in this entry (public GitHub release tarballs, md5 verified):
  • 1.2.0.0 → OJS 3.5.0.0 / 3.5.0.1
  • 1.1.0.0 → OJS 3.4.0.0–3.4.0.9

Provenance / credit

The plugin was rewritten and is maintained by OJSBR, based on an original OJS 3.3
access/downloads counter by STI-FFLCH/USP and ABCD/USP. That origin is credited in
the entry description. We couldn't find an actively maintained upstream repository for the
original, and OJSBR now maintains it under GPL-3.0.

Notes

• plugins.xml validated against plugins.xsd (xmllint --schema).
• No <certification> was set — happy for the reviewers to assign the appropriate one.
• Entry appended at the end of plugins.xml; glad to reorder if you prefer a specific spot.

[bozana]

Hi @edersotto,

Thanks for the submission, and for carefully crediting.

There are a few issues that would need to be fixed:

plugins.xml metadata

1. Please use the tilde form:

<compatibility application="ojs2"><version>~3.5.0.0</version></compatibility>
<compatibility application="ojs2"><version>~3.4.0.0</version></compatibility>

~3.5.0.0 matches every 3.5.0.x. ~3.4.0.0 matches every 3.4.0.x.
The explicit 3.5.0.0 / 3.5.0.1 only match those exact patch releases, so an install on 3.5.0.2+ won't see the plugin as compatible.

2. Locale codes. The entry uses only locale="en_US" (plugin name, summary, description, and the per-release ). OJS 3.4/3.5 use the short code en internally, so these don't locale-match on current installs (they fall back to first-available, so nothing is blank, but it's not correct). The gallery convention is to provide both, locale="en" and locale="en_US" with identical text. Please add the en variants alongside the en_US ones. pt_BR is fine as-is.

Code — blocking

3. Whole-template override frozen at 3.5.0.0. The plugin ships copies of templates/frontend/objects/article_summary.tpl and article_details.tpl and swaps them in via TemplateResource::getFilename. The copies are pinned to 3.5.0.0, and core has already changed both templates within the 3.5.0.x line, so installing the plugin silently reverts those changes. More importantly, this is structural: any future core fix to these templates won't reach sites running the plugin.

Could you please rework this to inject via the content hooks instead of replacing templates. As example, see https://github.com/pkp/pflPlugin/:

1. Hook::add('Templates::Issue::Issue::Article', …) for the summary list and Hook::add('Templates::Article::Main', …) (or ::Details) for the article page — covers displaying the badge on both pages; the counting logic is PHP and is unaffected.
2. A small stylesheet added via $templateMgr->addStyleSheet(…) from your existing TemplateManager::display hook to position .viewcounter-stats next to the title (see PflPlugin::addPflJsAndCss()). If core markup shifts, the badge just stays at its hook location instead of breaking the page.
3. If you want it pixel-exact at the title, $templateMgr->registerFilter('output', …) is the pattern you could use for insertions where no hook exists (PflPlugin::authorCiFilter).

This solution keeps the plugin forward-compatible with 3.5.x releases.

Code — minor

4. clearTemplateCache() on every settings save. ViewcounterSettingsForm::execute() calls TemplateManager::clearTemplateCache(), which flushes the entire installation's compiled-template and Smarty cache (cache/t_compile/ + cache/t_cache/, all journals) — triggered by any journal manager. Once the override is replaced with hooks this is no longer needed and can be removed.

5. Uncached statistics queries during list rendering. Both releases run a stats aggregation query per article while rendering article lists — 1.1.0.0 through the deprecated Submission::getViews() / Galley::getViews() (one per galley, and getViews() is called twice per article in the 1.1.0.0 template), 1.2.0.0 about two per article. On an issue TOC with 20–30 articles that's dozens of aggregation queries per page load.

Suggested approach: a single per-submission cache (viewcounter-{submissionId}, 24h TTL). plugins/generic/pflPlugin caches its stats the same way (Cache::remember(...)). Fill it per-context:

• Article page → fill the one key.
• List contexts (issue TOC, search) → prime the cache in bulk. There's no {call_hook} in issue_toc.tpl, but from the TemplateManager::display hook on frontend/pages/issue.tpl you can read $templateMgr->getTemplateVars('publishedSubmissions'), collect the submission IDs, and fill all the missing keys with one grouped query ('submissionIds' => [...], getSum(['submission_id'])) instead of one per row.

6. Hard-coded Portuguese in the 1.1.0.0 template — title="Visualizações", aria-label="Visualizações: …" etc. 1.2.0.0 already fixed this with __(); the 1.1.0.0 template should use locale keys too.

Happy to re-review once the template handling is reworked and the plugins.xml metadata is adjusted.

Thanks!

[edersotto]

Hi @bozana, thank you for the thorough review. Everything is addressed:

• plugins.xml: tilde compatibility (~3.5.0.0 / ~3.4.0.0) and en + en_US locales alongside pt_BR.
• Code: the template overrides are gone. The badge is injected via Templates::Issue::Issue::Article and Templates::Article::Main, with a small stylesheet/script added from the TemplateManager::display hook to place it next to the title (it stays at the hook location if the markup differs). Counts are cached per submission for 24 h (Cache::remember) and primed in bulk on list pages with one grouped query (getSum(['submission_id'])). clearTemplateCache() was removed and all labels come from locale keys.

New releases: 1.3.0.0 (OJS 3.5) and 1.1.1.0 (OJS 3.4), both from the same code. Ready for re-review, thanks again!

[bozana]

Hi @edersotto, great!
I have a few more comments:
Blocker (1.1.1.0 / OJS 3.4 only):

• ViewcounterPlugin::isFeatureEnabled() (line 418) references a constant that does not exist in 3.4:
  $contextId = $context ? $context->getId() : PKPApplication::SITE_CONTEXT_ID;
  SITE_CONTEXT_ID should actually be CONTEXT_SITE.

Would be good to fix:

• The OJS 3.4 plugin contains 3.5 languages. On 3.4 fr should actually be fr_FR, pt -> pt_PT, nb_NO -> nb, sr_Latn -> sr@latin. (The locale codes were only renamed to the Weblate style in 3.5).
• "Rewritten and adapted for OJS 3.4/3.5 by OJSBR. Original plugin by STI FFLCH and ABCD/USP" is displayed in the plugin description and in the settings modal. Having it in README , versions.xml and file headers is enough, no? And in the gallery entry here in the PR, the <maintainer> element should be enough — no need to repeat it in <description>?
• You can add <certification type="reviewed"/> (see other plugin gallery examples).
• Remove blank line before </plugins>.

Optional/cosmetic:

• The release tarball includes .github/ and .gitignore. Eventually you would like to remove/ignore them?

Thanks a lot!