SimpleStats is a lightweight Umbraco backoffice package that tracks page views for your content and shows the results inside the CMS. There's no external analytics service, no JavaScript tracking snippet, and no cookies — every published request is counted server-side and the results are shown in a dashboard next to your content tree.
A little background
This weblog is still running Umbraco 13 and the reason for that is that it has some custom code that tracks pageviews for content nodes. Just to see how popular an article, or topic is. The rest doesn't matter to me. I could have simply upgraded the code to V17 but for a while I wanted to create this as a community package. Now that we are in the summer and I ping pong between work and holiday/home constantly I finally have the time.
Completely Written by AI
Besides building yet another Umbraco package. The main goal for me was to see if I could create an entire Umbraco package just by using Claude Code or other AI tooling.
Steps I followed
I am no AI expert but just to describe the steps how I build the tool I did the following:
- Created a new Github project and instructed CoPilot that I wanted two projects, an MIT file and a GitIgnore file. (I think next time I let Claude do all the work).
- Created a logo using ChatGPT
- Pointed Claude to the old C# Code and made sure the middleware, background tasks and database were in place.
- Followed this Awesome blogpost from Phil and created a design system for Umbraco Backoffice.
- Created a design based on the design system that was created
- Implemented the design in Claude Code
- Implemented controllers and logic in the TypeScript project so data could be displayed
- updated readme
- Added a build pipeline
- Updated NuGet Info
- Created a marketplace json file
And all of this with just telling Claude what to build next as we were implementing PBI's from a backlog. I didn't write a single line of code for this package. Amazing times were we are in.
What's next for this package?
First of all v18 support. If the sun wasn't shining all day I did it already, but more important I want to make sure this package will run without me being involved constantly so Inspired by the post from Shannon the other day I want to implement this in my workflows as well. Besides that I want to implement a few tips Paul Seal gave during Codegarden this year about automated testing for his clean starter kit.
Check this package out
If you want to know more about this package, you can find more info on the Umbraco Marketplace or on GitHub.
Final thoughts
This was a really nice experience and a great start how to build Umbraco packages by describing what you want to build and not the how into too much detail.
It took me 2 full days I guess, so could I have implemented this faster? Maybe, since I had the original code. But I learned so much and seeing the codebase be more robust (with tests etc) that alone was worth all the time.
Will I use Claude Code next time in my commercial products or client work? Absolutely! Besides just being more productive I can see this also helps with the ever skipped maintenance releases on every project where you don't have the time to refactor code since the business wants you to work on features. Let the AI refactor while you work (with AI) on new features.
Hope you like the tool as well and enjoy the rest of the summer!