Pulse Pro version 1.9 is now out and ready for download, here is a rundown of what's new.

Stats

The stats feature is a great way to quickly see what's happening on your site today. It lets you see your overall traffic, where it's coming from and what pages users are visiting most. But there was a problem with the previous version. It was over reporting visits by about 25%. The reason? In a word, bots. Bots traverse the web and ping your site for all sorts of reasons, some legit and some not.

The stats tracking script had been filtering out some of the most well know bots like the Google indexer, Facebook, Yahoo, MSN, etc. But there are literally thousands more that slip though and can get counted. The new version of the tracking code is called by Javascript, which almost all bots do not execute. It's far too resource intensive for them to crawl the web and run all the JS it comes across. The downside is that some real users who disable JS will not be counted, but recent worldwide stats show that only about 1% of web users disable JS. So it makes more sense to under report visits by 1% than over report by 25%. I have compared the new stats results to other analytics services and they are now matching almost exactly.

In addition to being much more accurate, there is also a new metric, "Pages Per Visit". This is an average of the pages each visitor views before leaving.

Stats Demo 

Events Calendar

The events calendar is a new block that comes with Pulse by default. It is basically a pre-styled block that you can fill out and embed on your website. There are two blocks included to start with, one for the current month and one for drafting the next month. The intended workflow is that you start with the current month and replace it (via simply copy/pasting source) with the draft month as the current month ends. Or you could show 2 or 3 months on your site a time for long term outlook of upcoming events. It's very simple and very customizable so you can really use it any way you like.

Frontend Events Demo 

Backend Events Demo 

Comment Notifications

The next feature is an improvement to an existing one. When your blog receives a new comment, it will now show the actual comment in the email as well as the user name of the person who posted it. This saves you time in that you don't have to go to your blog to read the comment, especially nice if you are getting the email via a smart phone.

Redactor, Jquery Upgrades

The version of Redactor (redactojs.com) that Pulse uses has been upgraded to the latest v8.02.  In addition JQuery is has been upgraded to version 1.8.

Design Improvements

There are many design improvements on the backend and the front-end.

Under the Hood

The blog code base has been completely overhauled as well as the front-end controller. These will not affect functionality, but it makes things work a little more efficiently under the hood and reduces some code bloat.

Upgrading

Download here: pulsecms.com/getpro 

To upgrade any 8.x version, just replace the following folders:

pulsepro/css/
pulsepro/includes/ (make sure to copy back your config.php)
pulsepro/plugins/
pulsepro/index.php