Martijn Pieters: Linktally, ranking popular pages in a CMS¶

Updating a counter in the CMS on every page access isn't generally a good idea. CMS datasources are normally optimised for read access, so writing on every read HURTS. It doesn't scale. And it doesn't scale to clustering.

The idea is to reuse the server logs (apache). Linktally doesn't deliver exact results, but it is simple, scalable, content oriented, CMS-independent. It doesn't deliver exact counts, but it provides a ranking, which one is the most popular.

The architecture is that the logs are shoved through Linktally which stores it in a simple database. Linktally grabs its configuration from a plugin in the CMS, that same plugin also grabs the results from the database. What linktally grabs from the CMS is actually a list of links to look for in the logs.

The CMS can query linktally for the x most popular pages. Or the x most popular news items. Or...

Linktally 0.1 has just been released. This version only supports apache combined logfiles. And there's only a zope/cmf plugin at the moment. The plugin is real easy to write, so he hopes more people will add plugins.