Site Usage plugin

[TimW]

Hi all!

Ubiquity is happy to have released a new plugin that may be of interest to Journal Managers and Journal Editors. The ‘Site Usage’ plugin creates a new page within the Statistics menu of the backend of OJS, where the journal can embed a metrics dashboard that is provided by a third-party metrics service. For Ubiquity, we’re using Plausible.io (see here for why) but the functionality should be the same for other services that provide embedding code.

The plugin can be found at: https://gitlab.com/ubiquitypress/ojs-plugin-site-usage

Once installed, simply enable the plugin and then add the embedding code to the plugin setting.

The plugin has been created for OJS 3.3.0

[marc]

Hi @TimW

Thanks a lot for sharing this!

We have been testing Plausible for a while and recently we opened it to all our journals.

We will try to your plugin (as the integration is much better than remembering a password for an external platform) and I will be back with feedback.

Thanks again for sharing your work with the community.

Take care,
m.

[TimW]

No problem at all - we’ve had extremely positive feedback from our editors.

[marc]

I missed to say that I like a lot the way you implemented this.

A free text area to embed “whatever you like” opens the door to nice hacks like… an intro text… JS combinations… css theming.

Thinking that plugin could be easily extended to be even more generic, letting users decide what label to show… so it could be used with plausible or with other tools you like to integrate.

Cheers,
m.

[TimW]

Yes, in practice you could add whatever you like - as you say, when embedding the site usage dashboard, it can easily include an introduction, instructions etc to also include on this page.

[supreme]

Hi, I ran into a blank page error after installing the plugin on OJS 3.3.0.14.

Below is the error log:

PHP Notice: Undefined index: certification in /journals/lib/pkp/classes/plugins/PluginGalleryDAO.inc.php on line 194

PHP Deprecated: Non-static method PKPApplication::getRequest() should not be called statically in /journals/plugins/blocks/mostRead/MostReadBlockPlugin.inc.php on line 70

[TimW]

Hi - could you say which version of PHP you are using?

[supreme]

Hi,
I’m using PHP 7.4

[marc]

I encourage you publish your plugin in the integrations secction of plausible:
https://plausible.io/docs/integration-guides

Cheers,
m.

[TimW]

Thanks - our team say that they know the fix and will implement one very soon. I’ll post back once it has been done.

[TimW]

Good idea, we do that

[TimW]

@supreme we’ve had someone look into this can they don’t think it is linked to this plugin.

The code is in another plugin MostReadBlockPlugin (which I guess is an outdated version of that plugin) We don’t have this line PKPApplication::getRequest() anywhere in the code for the Site Usage plugin, which would break it. I think that the issue is with MostReadBlockPlugin.inc.php