WordPress announced their much anticipated Stats Plugin today. Three things caught my eye, the first being how fast it is and uncomplicated in layout, a nice departure from what would appear to be the norm for statistics tracking systems.

Next, everything runs on their servers and not on your hosting service, which means you incur any load by taking advantage of it. This also makes the service run pretty fast, I was pleased to see how quickly the stats starting rolling in and how snappy the page load time is.

Lastly, the plugin itself is nothing more than a chunk of PHP code in one file. Nice, but more importantly this would indicate that the stats page is extensible by third parties. MyBlogLog could drop in some script and include embedded MyBlogLog stats on the same page in the dashboard, or Technorati could drop in their own widgets.

I was somewhat surprised to see that the plugin does not support WordPress MU (multi-user).

Tags: wordpress