count guests online

[seandelaney]

im developing a site where i want to track number of guests currently active but im not too sure how it works and im a little confused...

at the moment if a member logs in, i create a session with their uid, username, ipaddress, timestamp and the member can view any protected pages.  this all works fine and the session ends when they logout.

what i want now is too not only count logged in members (count active sessions), but also count non-members (guest)using sessions too, but am getting myself confusing on how to count both types.

hoping somebody can explain to me what i need to do?

[COBOLdinosaur]

When they hit the site you deliver set session to track them and issue a page.  When they login you flag their session as logged in.  Total guests  = total active sessions - total logged on sessions.

[Zyloch]

To add onto Cd&'s point, most likely the medium of storage would be your database which provides an easy way to count the number of records. You could have another field called 'active'

[seandelaney]

Thanks guys.

I found a class that handles sessions for guests so i intergrated that into my code, so now ive got both guest sessions been counted and registered member sessions been counter and both displaying on the same page which i wanted...

Thanks  :D  :glasses7:

[Srirangan]

Sean, could you let me know which class you used. Thanks. :)

[seandelaney]

Hi Srirangan,

Yes I found it from here:

http://www.zend.com/codex.php?id=1313&single=1

As i said, i had to tweak it abit to get it to work with my code to do "what" i wanted it to do.

As it stands, the code will just count guests and nothing else.  If you need a hand to count both like i have, just ask...

p.s remember we chated other day bout your PHP script to read RSS from google etc and you where having trouble... well i was looking through my library and came across a XML tips and hacks book that had example on how to read news alerts, news item from yahoo and google.

if you would like to see a PDF copy of the articles, just ask again...

Sean  :glasses7: