Hook when page is requested

The CMS Questions
1

I’m writing a simple analytics plugin for Kirby 3. So far I’ve only processed page requests in the page template, but since I want to support cached pages as well, the processing of the request must be done before the page is actually served to the client.

I have tried a route that listens for any pages, but it may conflict with other routes in the future. I have also tried to process the request in my plugin’s index.php file. But the index.php of the plugin is also loaded for each page in the backend, and I couldn’t find a way to distinguish between a “normal” page requested by a visitor and a backend page in the panel.

So what I’m basically looking for is a place where I can put my analtyics code, something like a hook that is fired when a user requests a page. Maybe there’s a really obvious way to do this that I don’t see!

1 Like
2

Kirby has the route hooks that you could use for this purpose:

3

Thank you very much for the quick reply! The route hook seems to be a good place. What would be the easiest way to distinguish between “normal” page request and panel requests? For the route:before hook seems to be fired for every backend and api page.

4

Yes, but you can rule out the api/panel paths by checking the path parameter…

5

Ah yes of course! For some reason I was only checking for the page id and the id seems to be the same for the pages home and panel home. With the path filtering everything works fine

6

For all who come across this via the search, this is the funtion I use:

function startsWith ($string, $startString) { 
  return (substr($string, 0, strlen($startString)) === $startString); 
}

function pathIsPage($path) {
  foreach (['panel', 'api', 'assets', 'media'] as $ignoreDir) {
    if ($path === $ignoreDir || startsWith($path, $ignoreDir . '/')) {
      return false;
    }
  }
  return true;
}
7

Hi @arnoson,

I, too, use a route hook for a simple pageview counter plugin.

I had some issues with route:before (AFAIR it was something about the hook being triggered even though eventually the route would not resolve and hop to the next instead; this was about a very specific setup where the frontend would feature prettified URLs that did not reflect my Kirby page structure), counting some page views twice and eventually settled for route:after – the benefit being that this is only triggered by routes that have actually been processed.

Here’s the hook I use for registering page views, maybe it’s of value for you or somebody else.

'route:after' => function ($route, $path, $method, $result) {

	// only for routes that yield a result
	if ($result) {

		// exclude requests that do not match a page
		if ($path != '' && !kirby()->page($path)) {
        	return;
		}

        // do something to register the view for $path

    }

}

I exclude requests where $path does not match an existing page, but that is probably more expensive (as page() leads to a request on the file system) than your substr-based string processing. I might actually adopt that in my next iteration :wink:

8

Thank you @sebastiangreger, this works great! I had the problem that also Error pages were beeing counted but your solution takes care of that now. I haven’t thought of kirby()->page($path). Might be handy if something with the substr path testing doesn’t work as expected.