I’ve had a lot of features on the table for bSuite for a while, but this recently discovered comment from John Pratt (whose Smorgasboard.net is a lot of fun), kicked me into gear to actually get working on it again. The result is bSuite 4, which is probably what bSuite 3 should have been all along.
The big news is that I’ve finally revamped stats tracking to work with caching mechanisms like WP Cache, WP Super Cache, Varnish, or whatever else. I’ve also got the search word highlighting working again, and that’s cache-friendly too. Yay for javascript, I say.
And in addition to making the stats cache-friendly, I’ve made them a little smarter, faster, and more useful. bSuite now tracks sessions, and reports both the number of page loads and the number of visitors to your site. To improve performance, stats are first recorded to a small table for incoming hits, then periodically processed (“migrated”) into the tables used to report stats. This reduces contention and improves write speeds for incoming stats hits.
The stats report now gets graphs for both the previous 24 hours and 30 days of activity. And because unlike external stats solutions, bSuite is integrated into your site, it can also report on your most popular tags and categories based on traffic.
I’ve also implemented a large number of improvements, bug fixes from the previous versions. Big thanks go to Matthew Batchelder (who helped with the javascript code), Jon Link (who both pointed out a lot of bugs in bSuite 3 and helped answer questions in the forums), Zach Tirrell (who helped develop migration strategy ages ago), and to everybody who’s posted a comment or review related to bSuite.
This is beta software, and some things definitely don’t work. The stats are working solidly, the other features appear free of catastrophic bugs, and I’ve had it running (in various stages of development) here at MaisonBisson for a month now. Still, read the warranty (there is none) and don’t blame me if Boba Fett jumps out of your server after installing it.
Get the details at the bSuite page, download bSuite 4beta1 here.