What is viewing user profiles in PHP

When you build a PHP application you often need to show profile information for each user.

Tracking when a user views another’s profile helps you understand engagement.

For example, you might log an event when John Smith sees Jane Doe’s profile.

This data can help you improve user experience and tailor content.

Introducing Operational

Operational is an open-source event tracking service.

It lets you capture events from any application with minimal setup.

You can record custom events like profile views, button clicks, or page loads.

Setup Operational

To start sending events with Operational:

1. Go to app.operational.co and sign up for an account.
2. Create a new project and copy your API key.
3. Install the PHP SDK or use your preferred HTTP client:

   composer require operational/sdk

4. Initialize the SDK in your code with your API key.

Code example: Tracking profile view event

<?php
require 'vendor/autoload.php';

use Operational\Operational;

$ops = new Operational('YOUR_API_KEY');

$payload = [
    'name'    => 'Profile Viewed',
    'avatar'  => '👤',
    'content' => 'User John Smith viewed profile of Jane Doe'
];

$ops->events->ingest($payload);

This example sends a “Profile Viewed” event to Operational whenever someone views a user’s profile. You can view it in your dashboard.

Conclusion

Using Operational saves time by handling event capture and storage for you.

You don’t need to build your own analytics backend.

Learn more on the Operational home page.

Experiment with snippets in the Playground to get started quickly.