implemenatations of product hit counters

Question

I have been scouring for a while about this one but haven't seen a decent tutorial.

the problem is I want to create a hit counter everytime a product's page is viewed

I am using a PHP MVC framework and these are what I want to do

1. update a database counter everytime a page is visited
2. check if a the product is repeatedly viewed in the same terminal to avoid multiple viewing from one user

How will I go about implementing this?

Answer 1

Depending on how accurate you want it to be...

• If accuracy is not a major concern, save a cookie or a session value to the client. Check this before incrementing counter. This is simplest to implement.
• Create a table in your db which keeps track of what IP address (or other metric) has viewed what product. This would give a more accurate reading I think, but is considerably more complex.