PHP-and-MySQL/C4/Simple-Visitor-Counter/English-timed

Time	Narration
00:00	Welcome to this tutorial on a page counter.
00:02	This will count how many people have visited your page per refresh.
00:07	So every time someone enters the page, a value will be incremented, will be stored in a text file and it will be displayed to the user.
00:15	Or you can keep it to yourself. It's your choice whether you want to display.
00:19	Please note, this is a very simple way of doing this.
00:21	It won't count unique visitors.
00:23	I'll make a unique visitors tutorial soon.
00:27	It'll be probably available by the time you are viewing this.
00:30	So check it out. It will be more specific.
00:33	It deals with IP addresses.
00:35	However, for now, this is a basic counter tutorial and it's using file-storage as opposed to database-storage.
00:42	Ok. So the first thing we need to do is- create a file in which to store our value in.
00:48	There are 2 ways to do this.
00:50	Either right-click and create a new text document.
00:53	Or what I'll show you is how to create a file for opening which is the function fopen().
00:59	And we'll store it in the $file variable. But it's not mandatory.
01:05	And we'll say "count.php" and another parameter for this is whether you want it for writing, for reading or to append that, for example.
01:22	So, I'll say for writing.
01:26	Ok. Now I'll say fwrite() and I'll write to $file and I'll create a value of zero.
01:36	So, now we'll open our page-up and refresh.
01:41	We've got "counter.php". Click on that and when we go back, see if we've got count.php.
01:49	So, ".txt".
01:51	So, let's refresh this.
01:54	Ok, so now we should have a ".txt" file.
02:00	Let me remove this - "count.php".
02:05	Now we've done that and we really don't need this code.
02:08	So, I'll delete this part but I'll retain this and now I'll say I want to read from the file.
02:14	You could type this manually also. You just have to create a file for writing instead of reading.
02:22	So, we've got our file and we've got our value of zero in it.
02:26	So, let's open it and see.
02:28	Yes, we've got "count.txt" with zero that will read this and put it into that.
02:34	So, now, I need to get the contents of the file.
02:37	So, instead of fopen() I'll say, 'file_get_contents()'.
02:42	So, I'll type 'file_get_contents'.
02:44	And that will get the contents of 'count.txt'.
02:48	Ok. Then I'll say echo and use the variable and I'll say echo $file.
02:52	Now what this will do is it will say file_get_contents and it will get the contents of our text file with our count variable in there.
03:02	And it will say echo out the contents of the $file.
03:05	So, let's go back to our page and we will refresh.
03:07	Click on "counter" and we've got zero at the moment.
03:10	Refreshing. It's still staying at zero as displayed here.
03:14	If I change this to 'hello' and I went back to our page and refreshed, it'll have the value 'hello'.
03:20	So, we are just echoing out whatever is in this text file at the moment.
03:25	And right now it's zero - the integer zero.
03:30	Now to echo this, I'll have to say "You've had $file visitors".
03:37	So, that will give us something like that.
03:40	Now, what I'll do is I will create a new variable called $visitors.
03:46	And I'll say that is equal to $file.
03:50	I'll put this up here to be more efficient and easy to read as well.
03:55	And I'll say '$visitors' and we can tell what this is going to be.
04:00	And then what we'll say is $visitors.
04:05	Visit-ors - new - equals this $visitors plus 1.
04:14	So, this will be our new value.
04:17	Then I'll go ahead and say $filenew, so I'm creating a new file.
04:22	I'll open that as "count.txt" because that's what it is.
04:27	And I'll say to write this file.
04:30	Now if it was 'a+' that means 'append' - so I'm appending something onto the file which means that I'm adding to it.
04:38	What I want to do is overwrite, so I'll put 'w'.
04:42	And then I'll say 'fwrite()' like we did in our first part - to '$filenew'
04:47	and the value that I need to write is '$visitorsnew'.
04:50	This is going to work. Let's just go through it before you run it.
04:55	We've got our main file and that's getting the contents of our "count.txt" which is zero at the moment.
05:04	We're setting our variable called '$visitors' to the contents of the '$file'.
05:07	We're echoing out to the user how many visitors there have been.
05:11	And we're creating a new variable with the 'visitors + 1' - namely the person that is viewing this page at the moment.
05:20	That becomes significant. That's the person adding the extra 1 in there.
05:24	And then we're opening a new file as we saw in the start of this tutorial but instead we're using 'w' for write.
05:32	And then we're writing to our new file the new value which is increment of 1.
05:37	So, let's refresh and you can see - oh!.
05:41	It's not working!
05:42	Ok, so let's check this code.
05:44	Let's check the spelling of visitors - Visit-ors new. Ok. Visit-ors.
06:01	That's the reason. I had to put a 'n' in there.
06:06	So, "count.txt".
06:07	Now this time, we are adding 1 each time we refresh.
06:12	So you can see that the value is in fact going up.
06:16	Now obviously to reset this, all you would have to do is -
06:19	Ah! a warning. 'count.txt' has been changed because we have edited it.
06:24	I'll say 'reload from disk'.
06:27	And it's changed to 19, as you can see, it displayed 18 there.
06:30	The reason is that we're echoing this out before we put our new value in.
06:35	So, for maximum efficiency and to get the actual correct value, I'll put this code down there.
06:41	As a matter of fact, when I am refreshing here and let's say- we get to 25 visitors and we come back here, we'll have the value 26.
06:51	Ok, well, may be I'm being a little disorganized here.
06:55	There's no major efficient way to do it.
06:57	This will always echo out '$visitors'.
06:59	So just for variation, we'll say '$visitorsnew'.
07:07	So, this will equal exactly - oh no!
07:11	visitors new - another spelling mistake.
07:16	Right, so let's increment to 35 and we're going to contents and this value equals 35.
07:24	Position isn't everything when you have to deal with a code as simple as this but it does help.
07:30	Ok - so that's the basic tutorial.
07:32	If you'd like to get any help on it, then please get in touch.
07:35	But for now, try this out, give it a go.
07:37	Also watch my other tutorial on the more advanced counter that takes IP addresses into account.
07:43	Thanks for watching. This is Osama Butt, dubbing for the Spoken Tutorial Project.

Contributors and Content Editors

Gyan, PoojaMoolya, Pratik kamble, Sandhya.np14