Getting Mint's Doorbell pepper to work with Drupal

Posted 6 months ago in Drupal

Mint is awesome. I started using it a few days ago, and am very impressed. Having been used to Google Analytics, I wholly embraced the idea of Mint's "instant stats".

I started peeking around some of the available plug-ins, dubbed "peppers", and found Doorbell. Doorbell flashes your Mint admin interface whenever someone accesses your site (green for new uniques, white for repeat visitors).

After installing the pepper, I realized that it's not accurately detecting new hits. After a few minutes of investigation, I come to realize that it has to do with Drupal's use of Apache's 'mod_expires', set by default in your .htaccess of any Drupal install.

No worries, all you'll need to do is exclude your 'lastvisit.txt' file from being cached, and you'll be all set. I was lazy, and simply set it to not cache any '.txt' files. This should do it for you:

<FilesMatch "\.(txt)$">
  ExpiresActive Off
</FilesMatch>

1 Comment

Michelle

6 months ago

This looks like a really nice program. I use GA but find much of it confusing. Now isn't a good time for me to be buying software, but I'll keep this in mind for when I can. Thanks for the tip.

Michelle