To save the number of views for your resources, you can use a database to store the view data. SQL is a good choice for this purpose. You can create a separate table within the same database as the rest of your site to store the view information.
Here's an example of how you can structure your table:
CREATE TABLE resource_views (
id INT AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
resource_id INT,
view_date DATETIME
);
In this table, resource_id represents the ID of the resource being viewed, and view_date stores the date and time when the view occurred.
Whenever a resource is viewed, you can insert a new row into the resource_views table with the corresponding resource_id and the current date and time.
To differentiate the display of views by month, day, or quarter, you can use SQL queries to aggregate the view data based on the desired time period. For example, to get the number of views per month, you can use the following query:
SELECT MONTH(view_date) AS month, COUNT(*) AS view_count
FROM resource_views
GROUP BY MONTH(view_date)
This query will return the month number and the corresponding view count for each month.
Remember to index the resource_id column for better performance if you have a large number of resources.
By using a separate table for view data within the same database, you can easily query and manipulate the view information alongside the rest of your site's data.