Tracking Resource Views in a TV and Sorting Ditto by That Value

If you want “most viewed” listings in Evolution CMS, one practical approach is to store hits in a TV and sort the output by that saved value later.

This donor proposed a pragmatic solution for “popular content” blocks: write page view counts into a TV and then let Ditto sort documents by that saved value.

Example plugin logic

if ($modx->documentObject['donthit'] != 1 && $_SESSION['usertype'] != 'manager') {
  $current = $modx->getTemplateVarOutput('count', $modx->documentIdentifier);
  $current = $current['count'] + 1;
  setTemplateVar($current, $modx->documentIdentifier, 'count');
}

A practical implementation uses a helper to insert or update the TV value in site_tmplvar_contentvalues.

Important detail

The donor explicitly recommended using the plugin on OnWebPagePrerender. That keeps the counter update aligned with a real page render and avoids counting manager previews.

Recommendation

This is a workable legacy pattern when you need a quick popularity metric without introducing a separate analytics table. Just remember that it is still application-level counting, not a substitute for serious analytics.

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