Virtuemart Expert

There is a nice component available for Joomla that displays the GA-Statistics right in your Joomla administration. This is really cool – but there is one thing that i really don’t like: the username and password for the google account are stored as plain text as a component parameter in #__component. So, everybody who has access to the database can read my username and password of my google account. As a user of different google services (such as Gmail), i really don’t want this.

I have thought about how to improve this. The best thing would be to create a new google-account just for the analytics. But that’s quite a lot of work if you have different sites.

Another solution could be not to store username and password in the database and enter it each time you want to see the statistics. So i have extended the component that it can use the information during a session. You can also clean the session-login if you are done. We have made a little video that shows how it works:

I have sent the code we have changed to the developer of this component. Maybe he is willing to add this feature. You can also download a patch file for the version 1.0.5 here. Just backup the admin-directory of the component and extract the patch-file to the root-directory of your Joomla-installation and overwrite existing files.

Attention: the patch is just tested by me. I am not responsible for errors, loss of data or any other problems that my result from the use of this patch. Use it on your own risk.

Link to the component on JED

Download the patch-file (ATTENTION: the patch is made for version 1.0.5! There is a version 1.0.6 available. The patch hasn't been tested with the newer version!)

[UPDATE] The developer has informed me that the new 1.0.7 release has session login built in now (next to other new features). So, you will only need this patch if you stay with version 1.0.5 for any reason.

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