The problem

I needed an easy way to gather up some of these daily stats into a .csv file for later analysis and monitoring.

Data I was interested in:

• The approximate current number of installs (this number is rounded)
• The number of yesterday’s new downloads (today’s downloads depends on what time you run the script)
• The number of total downloads
• The number of support issues reported within the last month
• The number of support issues resolved within the last month

Most of these numbers are found in the static HTML, but the download counts are added in later via JavaScript. Hence the need for phantomjs.

The solution

A good place to go to gather these statistics is the advanced view of WordPress.org. For example, to see some basic statistics for my plugin, Bitcoin and Altcoin Wallets, you could visit:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wallets/advanced/

Scraping a static HTML page is easy. For example, it could have been done in PHP using phpQuery. But I decided to use this opportunity as a gentle introduction into learning PhantomJS. PhantomJS is very useful for black box testing, but it is also suitable for scraping data. Additionally, I would like to scrape the download counts that are not available as part of the static HTML.

The script is now posted on github. See the README.md file for usage instructions.

https://github.com/alex-georgiou/wordpress-plugin-stats-scraper

Running it daily

The plugin is suitable for running via cron. You should run it once a day.

Keep in mind that tasks running with cron may not have the working directory you expect. And the path variable might be empty. So make sure to specify full paths. Here’s how it looks like in my crontab:

0 1 * * * QT_QPA_PLATFORM=offscreen /usr/bin/phantomjs /home/alexg/wordpress-plugin-stats-scraper/wordpress-plugin-stats-scraper.js wallets /home/alexg/wallets-stats.csv

The post 👻 Monitor analytics of a public WordPress plugin using PhantomJS appeared first on Alexandros Georgiou.

Have you tried POT?

Hopefully you’ve already used the i18n functions in your PHP code. For example, a simple translatable string would look like:

$text = __( 'Text to internationalize', 'language-domain-slug' );

The purpose of this article is not to list all the relevant functions, you can look them up here. These are all wrappers to gettext.

The important thing to note is that you need to run something to generate your Portable Object Template files. These .pot files can then be copied to Portable Object .po files, then translated to Machine Object .mo files. These .mo binaries are finally loaded by the end user’s WordPress installation to provide the translated strings to the plugin, or theme. No surprises up to here, all of this is standard.

Grow your own with Grunt!

What I will present today is an easy way to use grunt to generate the following:

1. Two .pot files, one with the front-end strings and one with the admin area strings, and
2. .mo files for any .po files in your project

You will still need to copy the .pot files to .po files manually and provide the translations. Let’s get started:

The first thing to add to our Gruntfile.js is grunt-wp-i18n. This is a grunt plugin that I have found to be a little more flexible than the alternative, grunt-pot. So, as usual, add this grunt plugin to your dev toolbox:

npm install grunt-wp-i18n --save-dev

grunt.loadNpmTasks( 'grunt-wp-i18n' );

makepot: {
    front: {
        options: {
            cwd: 'build',
            potFilename: 'myplugin-front.pot',
            include: [ '/path/to/files', '/more/files', '/etc' ],
            domainPath: 'languages/',
            type: 'wp-plugin'
        }
    },
    admin: {
        options: {
            cwd: 'build',
            potFilename: 'myplugin.pot',
            include: [ '.*' ],
            exclude: [ '/path/to/files', '/more/files', '/etc' ],
            domainPath: 'languages/',
            type: 'wp-plugin'
    }
}

Make pot

grunt makepot

This will make two files in your project, /build/languages/myplugin.pot and /build/languages/myplugin-frontend.pot. Do not commit these files, we’ll let them auto-generate every time. The /build directory is in my .gitignore list.

Using pot

cp build/languages/myplugin-front.pot src/languages/myplugin-front-de_DE.po
cp build/languages/myplugin.pot src/languages/myplugin-de_DE.po

cp build/languages/myplugin-front.pot src/languages/myplugin-front-ar.po
cp build/languages/myplugin.pot src/languages/myplugin-ar.po

We’ll use another grunt plugin, grunt-po2mo. First add it to your project:

npm install grunt-po2mo --save-dev

And add the following into your Gruntfile to load it:

grunt.loadNpmTasks( 'grunt-po2mo' );

This one requires very little configuration. Add the following target into your Gruntfile:

po2mo: {
    plugin: {
        cwd: 'src',
        src: 'languages/*.po',
        dest: 'build',
        expand: true
    }
},

This config expects that the .po files are in the /src/languages directory where we placed them earlier. It places the .mo files in the /build/languages dir. All you need to do for this is:

grunt po2mo

You will also need to tell your plugin to actually go and use these .mo files. Easy. Just hook to the plugins_loaded action and load the text domains:

function action_plugins_loaded() {
    load_plugin_textdomain( 'myplugin', false, dirname( plugin_basename( __FILE__ ) ) . '/languages/' );
    load_plugin_textdomain( 'myplugin-front', false, dirname( plugin_basename( __FILE__ ) ) . '/languages/' );
} // end function action_plugins_loaded

add_action( 'plugins_loaded', 'action_plugins_loaded' );

That’s it!

Make sure to include the makepot and po2mo targets in your build task. Finally use grunt-contrib-compress or another plugin to compress your entire build directory to a .zip file that is ready to be installed into WordPress!

Pass it on.

The post 😛 How to make pot with WordPress appeared first on Alexandros Georgiou.