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Hi all,

This is my first post at this forum. What I’m trying to accomplish with EE is to store the timestamp of the first visit of a user in a site. So this would be a variable that gets set only once on the first page visit within the site. How can this be done, does EE support this? should I use native PHP to do this?

Thanks in advance

Ok.  In order for EE to recognize that this is my first time to visit, it would have to be able to distinguish me from every other person using the internet.

How about the date time stamp of registration.  This would be the join date from the exp_members table.

Members are taken out of consideration. This is for everyone visiting the site without the need of registration

you could write some PHP or javascript that creates a cookie in the visitor’s browser with this information.

Cookie would work, but you might really annoy people if they don’t accept cookies.  The would be treated like first time visitors every time.

Cookie would work, but you might really annoy people if they don’t accept cookies.  The would be treated like first time visitors every time.

True.. but that would be the case anyway…

I’ve written a plugin called Been There! that does roughly what you are looking for, but on a post by post basis. It uses cookies to store the state so it doesn’t work for everyone, but it’s perfect for it’s intended purpose.

It shouldn’t be too hard to alter it to work for you… You can take a look at the source over at GitHub.

Greetz,
Wouter