README.md
# Welcome to Toplytics [](https://travis-ci.org/presslabs/toplytics)
### About the makers
This plugin was developed by the crafty people at Presslabs—the Smart Managed WordPress Hosting Platform. Here we bring high-performance hosting and business intelligence for WordPress sites. In our spare time, we contribute to the global open-source community with our code.
We built this plugin in 2013 to provide a less resource consuming alternative to help our clients that wanted to display a list with the most popular articles on their websites and avoid counting clicks on the site by writing in the WordPress DB.
### What is Toplytics?
This plugin displays the most visited posts as a widget, using data extracted from Google Analytics. Toplytics is designed to work with high-traffic sites and all types of caching.
### Why Toplytics?
You can use this plugin if you want to display the most visited posts of your site in a safe and reliable manner, with no risk of downtime or slowness. The plugin is built for high-traffic sites where counting every visitor’s click loads up the DB and presents the potential of crashing the site. Of course, you need an active Google Analytics setup on your site to use this plugin.
### Toplytics features:
- shortcodes are now supported for easier integration into posts/pages or other widgets. Here is a quick example: `[toplytics period="week" numberposts="3" showviews="true"]`;
- connect with Google Analytics Account using OAuth 2.0 method;
- starting with the plugin version 3.0 we have switched to GA API v3. Toplytics
provides a widget displaying the most visited posts as simple links (no styling);
- use the widget to display the most visited posts from the past day, week or month;
- set the number of posts to be displayed between 1 and 250;
- display the number of views as counted by Google Analytics;
- support/translate i18n requests;
- generate the list of the most visited posts dynamically with JavaScript to correctly display them with any caching mechanism/plugin;
- use the custom template to display the widget. This should be included in the active theme folder.
### Receiving is nicer when giving
We’ve built Toplytics to make our lives easier and we’re happy to do that for other developers and site owners, too. We’d really appreciate it if you could contribute with code, tests, documentation or just share your experience with Toplytics.
Development of Toplytics happens at http://github.com/presslabs/toplytics
Issues are tracked at http://github.com/presslabs/toplytics/issues
This WordPress plugin can be found at https://wordpress.org/plugins/toplytics/
For more details about Toplytics, head here: https://www.presslabs.com/code/toplytics/