Piwik is now available on the Windows Web App Gallery, joining the ranks of WordPress, Acquia Drupal, Moodle, Joomla, and phpBB! IIS users can install these (and dozens of other web apps) using Web Platform Installer (aka Web PI or WPI) or WebMatrix. Our thanks to the IIS, Web Platform and Tools team at Microsoft for their feedback and recommendations.

The Piwik team will continue to build and support official releases for the Web App Gallery.

Note: due to the submission/verification/approval process, there will be some delay between a release on piwik.org and its appearance on the Web App Gallery.

Piwik is now happy to present to our fans the 'map view' feature, allowing you to visually see the countries in which your visitors come from on a world map.

The new plugin made its way into Piwik core since version 0.8 and is activated by default since version 0.9. Here is a brief list of the currently supported features:

• The widget displays a zoomable world map in which the countries are colored according to the selected metric, e.g. the number of visitors.
• It is possible to change the displayed metric using a Select box in the footer bar of the widget.
• A resizable legend improves the usablity as it helps to understand the color scale.
• Users are able look at the map in fullscreen mode for better viewing experience on smaller displays.
• Like the other flash-based visualization widgets the map supports image export (PNG).

Implementation details

The map is built from scratch using the Open Source Adobe Flex SDK and the free FlashDevelop IDE. It basically consists of two parts: a preprocessor for the map data (AIR) and a fast map renderer (Flash). The following figure illustrates the different functions:

The map source is taken from  GeoCommons (an open community for geographic data) and was initially created by Emily Sciarillo, who released it under the Creative Commons license. The source contains a complete set of raw country boundary data which is linked to the corresponding iso codes. The map projection is done using the free as3proj library. Out of the many possible projection formulas we chose the Robinson projection, which shows a very beautiful world map. After projecting the map, the country outlines were simplified, which reduced the data filesize about 90% (from 2mb to 212kb) and results in faster rendering. In order to reduce the clients CPU load these complex calculations were rolled out into a separate application. The results are then packed in the Action Message Format (AMF) which produces a compact and fast to read binary files. The rendering is done using Flash, which is (yet) the only technology that provides fast vector drawing on nearly any major browser and platform. You can find more details on flash-based map rendering at the map author Gregor Aisch personal blog.

Use of the new Metadata API

The map rendering SWF requests the available metrics using the getProcessedReport function of the new Metadata API. The Metadata API is truly a great move forward in the Piwik plugin development as it eleminates the need for manual processing of raw Piwik metrics (like calculating the bounce rate or average time on site from several raw metrics) and also simplifies translations as all values are presented in localized format.

Possible Future Developments

Right now the map is in a very basic state, but we want to present some of our ideas for future versions of the map:

• Display of a detailed country view with the ability to compare sub-regions (like states in USA) and visitors cities. These features depend on the GeoIP plugin, which will is a high priority feature right after the 1.0 release. You are invited to participate in the design phase over here.
• Support for different client-side rendering technologies like SVG or HTML5 canvas.
• Support for server-side rendering for adding maps into PDF reports.
• Add a map view to the Live! plugin.

If you have any further ideas  on what you'd like to see, feel free to tell us in the comment section or just open a new feature request in the Piwik Developer Zone.

Open Source

The map is released under GPLv3. You find the source of both the map preprocessor and the map renderer in Piwik SVN.

World map demo

Here is a demo of the world map widget.

After a few hard months of development, the Piwik team is proud to present our brand new mobile client.

Piwik Mobile is already available in the markets for devices running iOS (like iPhone, iPod and iPad) or Android (1.6 or higher).

Piwik Mobile in the markets:
Android:  http://www.androidpit.com/en/android/market/apps/app/org.piwik.mobile/Piwik-Mobile-Beta
iOS:  http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/piwikmobile/id385536442?mt=8

Piwik Mobile is developed using Titanium and currently serves the most important metrics and reports. As Piwik Mobile is still in development and this is only the first version, not all reports are currently provided. The app uses the translations included in Piwik. Thus, it is available in all the languages which Piwik supports.

Further enhancements will follow. Since it is impossible for us to test the app on all existing devices, there may be problems with some of them. If you find errors in the app or if you even have suggestions for improvements, feel free to contact us at mobile{at}piwik.org or create a ticket.

Piwik Mobile is been developed by Thomas and Stefan, who joined the Piwik Team with the idea of a mobile client. They will supervise and maintain the further development as project leaders.

Our special thanks goes to Mayflower, a German web development company, which sponsored many hours of work by their developers Thomas and Stefan.

Piwik was recently released with an improved mechanism for handling javascript and css file inclusions. The main idea was to merge javascript and css files into two files. You can find out more about the way the idea was brought and have a look at discussions around it within the trac ticket: http://dev.piwik.org/trac/ticket/660.

In this blog entry we will review the new mechanism according to two points of view: the Piwik user and the Piwik developer.

Making Piwik UI faster for its users

Here is an overview of the improvements. How figures have been obtained is explained later on.

Improvement summary for CSS files

Improvement summary for JS files

The new mechanism has been designed with the main purpose of making the UI faster and more responsive so users have a great time using Piwik. The goal has been achieved by reducing the amount of http requests for javascript and css files from 32 and 14 respectively to two. In addition, both merged CSS and JS files have been minified.

In order to fully appreciate how much time we gain, we used the firefox extension firebug to have a detailed look at http requests before and after the mechanism has been applied. We will compare results both with the browser cache disabled and enabled. Disabling the browser cache simulates a first access to Piwik, enabling it simulates returning visits.

HTTP requests are captured while accessing Piwik demo dashboard (demo.piwik.org). From my computer, based in Paris area, request durations were fluctuating quite noticeably. A series of requests has been made in order to evaluate duration averages. Results taken from those measurements can only be approximates.

1) CSS files comparison, first access to Piwik

CSS files – Before optimization



CSS files – After optimization

Results: A gain is noticeable both in download size (minus 15%) and in download time (minus 80%).

2) JS files comparison, first access to Piwik

JS files – Before optimization

JS files – After optimization

Results: A gain is noticeable both in download size (minus 10%) and in download time (minus 45%).

3) CSS files comparison, returning visit to Piwik

CSS files – Before optimization

CSS files – After optimization

Results: The downloading time is reduced by 80%.

4) JS files comparison, returning visit to Piwik

JS files – Before optimization

JS files – After optimization

Results: The downloading time is reduced by 55%.

Those results clearly show conclusive improvements in handling JS and CSS files and in making Piwik a more enjoyable experience. The last part of the post is about what has changed for Piwik developers.

Making Asset Management a breeze for Piwik developers

With the new mechanism in place, Piwik developers benefits from a new approach in dealing with their JS and CSS files needs. Asset management is now framework oriented and fits nicely with the overall idea of Piwik being a Web Analytic framework.

JS and CSS files used to be included manually within smarty templates. Lets have a look at the VisitsSummary plugin in Piwik 0.6.3:

<script type="text/javascript" src="plugins/CoreHome/templates/sparkline.js"></script>

See http://dev.piwik.org/trac/browser/tags/0.6.3/plugins/VisitsSummary/templates/index.tpl#L1

It is no longer the case. Asset files are now included using the well-established event hook feature of Piwik.

Here is a 4 step how-to using the CoreHome plugin of Piwik 0.8:

1) Disable file merging and minifying

The new mechanism can work under two modes:

• Mode 1 (default mode), JS and CSS files are merged and minified into 2 files:
• Mode 2 (development mode): JS and CSS files are included individually without being merged and without being minified.

The first mode is to be used in a production environment. It is designed to offer the best performances.

The latter mode has to be used when adding, removing and modifying JS/CSS files. Changes will not be taken into account if the development mode is not activated. This mode has been designed to ease the debugging process. In this mode, each file is included individually to find javascript or css bugs more easily.

To activate the development mode, you can set disable_merged_assets=1 under the section [Debug] in your config/config.ini.php.
See http://dev.piwik.org/trac/browser/tags/0.8/config/global.ini.php#L56

You are now ready to add/remove/modify JS and CSS files.

2) Create two public initialization methods in your Piwik_Plugin class with the following signature

 function getCssFiles( $notification )
 {

 }

See http://dev.piwik.org/trac/browser/tags/0.8/plugins/CoreHome/CoreHome.php#L37

 function getJsFiles( $notification )

 {

 }

See http://dev.piwik.org/trac/browser/tags/0.8/plugins/CoreHome/CoreHome.php#L50

3) Declare the files to include using the following example

 function getCssFiles( $notification )

 {

     $cssFiles = &$notification->getNotificationObject();

     $cssFiles[] = "themes/default/common.css";

     $cssFiles[] = "libs/jquery/themes/base/jquery-ui.css";

     $cssFiles[] = "plugins/CoreHome/templates/styles.css";

     $cssFiles[] = "plugins/CoreHome/templates/menu.css";

     $cssFiles[] = "plugins/CoreHome/templates/datatable.css";

     $cssFiles[] = "plugins/CoreHome/templates/cloud.css";

     $cssFiles[] = "plugins/CoreHome/templates/jquery.ui.autocomplete.css";

 }

See http://dev.piwik.org/trac/browser/tags/0.8/plugins/CoreHome/CoreHome.php#L37

4) Hook the initialization methods to the correct events

 function getListHooksRegistered()

 {

     return array(

         'AssetManager.getCssFiles' => 'getCssFiles',

         'AssetManager.getJsFiles' => 'getJsFiles'

     );

 }

See http://dev.piwik.org/trac/browser/tags/0.8/plugins/CoreHome/CoreHome.php#L29

When the user visits Piwik UI, the Asset manager will emit the event 'AssetManager.getCssFiles' and 'AssetManager.getJsFiles'. Each plugin then hooks on this event, and adds its own JS/CSS files to the list of files to merge. AssetManager then uses CSSMin and JSMin library to generate the minified files.

We hope this post serves as a good overview of how Piwik UI has been made faster. There is always room for improvement, feel free to add comments with suggestions. We are always happy when Piwik evolves thanks to the community!

Recently, we released a powerful set of new APIs to track visitors, page views and goal conversions: Piwik Tracking APIs

If tracking visits using Javascript is not an option for you, you can use alternative ways to record visitors, visits, pages and Goal conversions in Piwik:

1. Simple Image Tracker
   The Simple HTML Image Tracker tag can be used when Javascript is disallowed but pure HTML allowed: MySpace, Ebay for example, but also email newsletters.
   Note: the code doesn't use Javascript so Piwik will not be able to track some user information such as search keywords, referer websites, screen resolutions, plugin support and page titles.
2. Piwik Tracking API
   You can call the Piwik Tracking API using your favorite programming language, over HTTP.
   Piwik comes with the PHP Client ready to use, providing a very easy way to track visits, page views, goal conversions, and also set Visitor details (user agent, language, URL, Referer URL, etc.).
   Clients for Perl, Python, Java or Ruby will hopefully be contributed by Piwik users in the future. Please let us know if you are interested to contribute your client.
3. Advanced Image Tracker
   The PHP Client can send direct requests to the Piwik API, but it can also generate an advanced image tag. The advanced image tag requires to be loaded in an HTML context.

Tracking API documentation

Learn more about tracking data using the new APIs in the official documentation: Piwik Tracking API documentation.

How Piwik used the new API to improve code quality and stability

We have made great progress recently regarding our Quality Assurance effort.

Using the new Tracking APIs, we added automated tests that

1. create website and goals
2. generate controlled hits to the Tracker
   • tracking pages
     • some of which have excluded URL parameters
   • tracking clicks and downloads
   • tracking Goals
     • matching URLs
     • triggered using the Javascript trackGoal() function
   • for several days
   • for several websites
   • with custom referers (direct entry, websites, search, campaigns)
   • with custom browsers and OS
3. generate hits with invalid states
   1. excluded IPs
   2. invalid websites
   3. simulate search bot visits
4. automatically call all API functions, and test that the returned XML matches the Expected XML output.

Using these set of tests, we are now able to detect very easily any regression introduced in the Tracking, Archiving or API code.

Tests now run continuously on Hudson, our build server. Learn more about our QA process and efforts

Feedback

Please let us know what you think in the comments.

Happy Tracking!!

Yesterday was a big day for Piwik – we released our brand spanking new Piwik Design and here's an overview.

The making of the new open source UI design

We knew the limitations of Piwik UI from our experience using the product, and the great community feedback via the forums and in-product feedback form. We built a short list of key things to improve:

• A more professional and 'feel good' design
• Increased usability for particular elements: calendar, website selector, and report tables footer icons

Thanks to the support from our sponsors, we were able to hire Marcin Gałęcki, a talented UI designer from Poland. He produced a set of concept mockups with new colors and a refreshing new style.

Marcin worked on making the mockups pixel perfect and realistic, redesigning the menus, calendar, selectors, reports, widgets, icons, etc. Once the mockups were finalized, we submitted them for feedback on this blog and got some great constructive feedback. After a final set of changes to the mockups, the new design was ready to be implemented.

Stepan Sukharyna, sponsored by German Agency Vorwärts GmbH, implemented the pixel perfect mockups in an efficient manner, quickly fixing all bugs that we reported.

We hope that the new design will make it easier for all Piwik users to analyse their Web Analytics reports, and spend more time improving Websites and Apps.

Calendar selector

Now much more visible and easy to use, the calendar lets you change the date and period of the reports you are looking at.

About Piwik message… and new updates!

We responded to your feedback, and made the "About Piwik" box a lot smaller and discrete.

However, when a new release is out, you won't miss it! As it will look like this:

New menu

New widget style

Notice the icons have been updated, the little arrow now shows which view you are currently looking at.

New report table design

Clearer and easier to read, the new report table lets you focus more on the actual data. You can easily switch from the basic report to the "All columns" table which shows: visits, unique visitors, actions per visit, average time on website and bounce rate.

New table design  for Page reports

The Pages report lets you expand and collapse your Pages. Categories are created when a character / is found in the URL.

Export Report data in two clicks

At the bottom of all report tables, you can click the Export icon, and export the current report in any of the following formats: CSV, TSV (CSV for Excel), XML, JSON, PHP or RSS. More information in the Analytics API doc page.

Create and track goals

The "Create a Goal" form has also been updated. Use it today to create and track your Goals using Piwik.

After creating your goal, you can view reports segmented by users who converted your goals. For example, which country had the most purchases? Which keyword resulted in higher download conversion rates?

All websites dashboard

Get a quick summary of how all your websites are doing: Visits, Pageviews and Unique Visitors. Check the Green/Red indicator, and if the last 30 days (or weeks, months) are decreasing… or aiming high!

Add a widget to your dashboard

The new widget selector is just too cool!

We also added a bonus feature: Piwik dashboard now remembers which view (table, pie chart, All columns) you selected last in the widget, and will restore it next time your reload your dashboard, saving you time.

UI Speed improvements!

Last but not least… we have also been working on the UI speed for this redesign. Julien Moumné, new developer in the Piwik team, implemented a new feature: merging all Javascript and CSS files together into one bigger file. In the previous release, Piwik used to make 1 http request for each JS and CSS file, resulting in more than 20 http requests to fetch css and js. Now, Piwik makes 2 requests only (one for CSS and one for JS file).

Summary

We are proud that this project was made possible by our sponsors, team members, community feedback, and is now ready!

Please spread the word on your blog, twitter, use Piwik and participate if you can. Thank you all!

The Piwik team invites interested individuals to apply for the volunteer position of Marketing and Community Coordinator.

If you have a flair for communications, marketing, and/or business development, feel free to send us an email at: hello@piwik.org

The Marketing and Community Coordinator's responsibilities would be to:

• improve the Piwik.org website: identify missing help, improve website content, create new Marketing content advertising Piwik features
• identify partnership opportunities with other open source projects (e.g. self-hosted web applications)
• liaise with partners and negotiate reciprocal agreements (e.g. back links, press releases, integration)
• liaise with prospective sponsors on how they can contribute
• help guide the Product vision: survey users to flesh out the high-level user requirements for new features (post Piwik 1.0)
• design landing pages/campaigns/goals to track the success of cross-promotion
• maintain Piwik's list of features
• prepare press kit, marketing material, help us decide on a final logo for the project
• work on some of the other identified projects that would add value to the project
• have a strong responsibility in an active and successful open source project

You will be working with the existing Piwik team from around the globe, communicating primarily via email or skype. Ideally, you will take a valuable role in the project and share our passion in the project.  You will help us achieve our objectives for Piwik and the community: to grow the downloads and user base, grow the Piwik team, and improve Piwik image to Enterprise users.

We are looking forward to hearing from you,
The Piwik team

p.s. this is an unpaid, volunteer position.

The Piwik team is proud to announce the release of Piwik 0.6.3

NEW! Tracking Goals in Piwik

The Goals plugin is now enabled by default starting Piwik 0.6.3. Goal tracking in Piwik is now stable and very useful! We use it on piwik.org itself to track number of downloads as well as visits to the demo.
You can easily check out the reports yourself by clicking 'Goals' in the menu in the online demo.

Check out the Goal reports in the screenshots below. You can check out the full user documentation about Tracking Goals in Piwik.

Create a Goal to track first

The Goal Overview gives a quick summary (conversions, conversion rates, revenues) of your goals

Screenshot of the Goal report for a specific Goal

For more information about Goal tracking, check out the full user documentation Goal Tracking documentation.

Other features for 0.6.3

Piwik auto archiving can now be easily setup under Windows with the new Powershell script. Check out the documentation. Thanks to halfdan for his patch!

Many other small bugs and improvements have been committed in this release, check out the Changelog for more information.

Piwik Web Analytics Addresses IP Address Privacy Concerns

Web site operators switch to Piwik for web analytics to comply with Germany's privacy laws over the controversial storage of visitor IP addresses.

Lyon, France (Press Release) — Apr 16, 2010 — German web site operators are flocking to Piwik, an open source, self-hosted web analytics platform. To comply with local laws, Piwik users can now configure the free software to mask visitor IP addresses, similar to the masking of a credit card number when printed on a receipt.

Robert Dürhager – Online Communications Manager of the internationally active charity organization Oxfam, states,

"As an aid organization, our supporters are our greatest asset. With Piwik, we have found a Web Analytics solution which meets Oxfam’s strict privacy policy and helps us to achieve further improvements. Apart from that, we love Open Source!"

Silvia Frank, press relations officer of the medium-sized German company Univention, a manufacturer of Open Source software, says,

"We have been using Piwik for over a year now. With Piwik, we can analyse visitor streams on our website which helps us to find out about our popular sites and gives us hints where it needs optimisation. A special highlight in Piwik is the simple possibility to measure the success and performance of online campaigns which we deliver on third party websites. Also, we appreciate the feature of the "anonymity analytics": we can gather all relevant data for our statistics without capturing an individual's IP addresses.

Pascal Herbert, one of the operators of the German web site, GoogleWatchBlog, praises Piwik,

"We've used Piwik since December 2009 and are very pleased with the latest version – especially with the privacy protection plugin. The developers are undertaking every effort for a successful release of Piwik 1.0."

Web site operators in Germany have found themselves in legal limbo following a series of rulings by Germany's courts. Beginning in 2007, Berlin cases concluded that IP addresses in conjunction with other data could be considered personal information. A 2008 Munich case stated that IP addresses in isolation were not personal information. Meanwhile, Germany's data protection commissioner, Peter Schaar, is on the record as stating that if a person is identifiable by an IP address, then it is personal information. Recently, in November 2009, a Dusseldorf court reaffirmed the Berlin decisions.

Adding to the debate, concerns have been raised about the potential legal liability (and lack of indemnification), data retention periods, and the exportation of web analytics to third party service providers located outside of Germany, such as Google.

The overwhelming response to Piwik and the AnonymizeIP feature has been very positive. And thanks to web developer, Peter Boehlke, the German version of Piwik.org is now available at http://de.piwik.org. "With Germany being the largest Piwik local community, translating the website in German made a lot of sense," says Matthieu Aubry, founder and lead developer of the Piwik project. "The software itself is already translated in 36 languages and growing!"

http://piwik.org

About Piwik

Piwik is the world's leading open source web analytics software. Used by more than 30,000 websites across the Internet, Piwik is growing as a serious open source alternative to Google Analytics. Piwik is translated into 36 languages and used in more than 100 countries. For more information, please visit piwik.org.

Media Contact Information
media@piwik.org

Contact
hello@piwik.org

###

The Piwik team is proud to announce the release of Piwik 0.6.2 – with Piwik 0.6.x releases, we have worked hard to add some of the most requested new features.

Major changes since Piwik 0.5.5

• Exclude webmaster visits by IP / Cookie
• Exclude URL parameters
• Configurable timezone and currency
• Editable User settings
• New report: Entry pages and Exit pages
• Pages reports now link the page URLs

Exclude webmaster visits by IP / Cookie
It is now possible to exclude your own visits either by IP or Cookie (as of 0.6.1). Exclusion by IP is useful if you have a static IP or work in a company with a fixed allocated IP range, whereas the exclusion based on a cookie is very handy when your IP is dynamic.

Exclude URL parameters
Some Content Management Systems produce their own session ids and append them to the URL. Also, your URLs may sometimes contain parameters that only add noise in your Pages reports. You can now specify these parameters that Piwik will then filter out of the statistics. Piwik automatically filters out common session parameters (SESSID, PHPSESSID, SESSIONID, etc.).

Configurable timezone and currency
It is now possible to give each website a different timezone! This is useful in cases where your website is hosted in a different timezone than the server running Piwik. Additionally you can set the currency that will be used for conversions in the Goal tracking plugin.

Editable User settings
Every user can now change their alias name, email, password and decide which report to load per default.

The new User settings page.

The new General settings page (only viewable by the Super User).

New report: Entry pages and Exit pages
You can now see, for each page being tracked, the best entry pages, exit pages, bounce rate and exit rate on each page. Each page in the reports are now clickable to the actual URLs.

New Entry pages report

New Exit pages report

More information

You can check out the full list of new features and bug fixes in the Piwik changelog, and download the latest Piwik release at piwik.org/latest.zip

For more information about installing or updating Piwik, Check out the How to update Piwik? and How to install Piwik? user guides.

UPDATE: New design has been released in Piwik!!!

click here for more information

Over the last 2 years, the Piwik User Interface has not changed much in terms of design.

We are now excited to announce that the time has come to give Piwik a makeover – a new and improved look and feel designed to meet the following objectives:

• The new design should make Piwik more appealing and give it a more modern and professional touch
• The new design should fix the issues with the current UI
  Some features are hard to use in Piwik. For example, the calendar and period selector is confusing and the website selector doesn't scale well with hundreds of websites.

With these objectives in mind, Marcin Galecki has been working hard alongside the Piwik team on mock-ups of the design. These mock-ups haven't yet been implemented, as this is still a work in progress and your feedback is important to us.

Note: click on the images to view them full size.

Dashboard

The dashboard mockup displays most new changes on the design:

• New menu
• New controller's style used for the Calendar, Add a Widget
• New style for the website selector and language selector
• New style for widgets: colors, the footer, and tables scrolling to the right when there is too much data to display. We tried to improve the widgets' footer to make it easier to access the other reports that Piwik provides: Advanced view to show all columns, 'Goals' view to see conversions for each segment.

Example 'Referers > Overview' report

This is an example of the "Referers Overview" report using the new styles.

Pages report

This mockup shows the style of the expandable data table, used in the Pages URLs and Page titles reports.

About Piwik message

By default, the message displayed would be short and sweet, and on Hover would display the full message.

Add a Widget selector

The "Add a widget" tool is now better integrated in the UI and re-uses the same styles as other selectors.

Website selector

The website selector currently does not scale if Piwik manages hundreds or thousands of websites and this new design would fix this usability issue. Only the first 10 websites (or 10 most recently used) would be displayed, and you could "Search" for websites (matching names and URLs).

Calendar

The calendar is a major usability issue in the current Piwik UI. In the dashboard mockups (see above), you can see that the calendar is now more visible. Also, the concept of Periods (day / week / month / year) is now directly integrated within the calendar selector itself, which makes more sense and makes it easier to use.

Icons set and widgets footer

Here are the full set of icons used in the mockups, and a detailed example of how the footers work.

Your feedback!

Piwik is currently used by more than 40,000 users, all with different backgrounds and objectives. The User Interface must accommodate the needs of every user from the most basic through to the advanced.

What do you think about this proposal? What do you like, and what could be improved?

Your feedback is really important to us – please send us your comments and suggestions via the blog or the forum thread and we will gather your feedback and contributions over the next 10 days or so. We will then work with the designer to prepare the final version of the mockups, which will then be implemented.

Thank you!

Piwik 0.6 is nearly ready, but we decided to release a public 0.6-rc1 (release candidate) version so that anyone can try it out and provide feedback.

What is new in Piwik 0.6?

We listened to your feedback and worked on a few of the most requested features. They mostly focus on administration screens and ease of use (screenshots below):

• New User settings screen
  Each user can now edit their name, email and change their password. Also, they can choose which report to load by default when logging into Piwik (Dashboard for a specific website, or the "All Websites" dashboard) as well as the default date (today, yesterday, current week / month / year). The Super User can also specify these settings for the "anonymous" user.
• Support for Timezone
  You can now specify the timezone for each website in Piwik. If you live in Europe but your servers are located in North America, Piwik used to report data according to the server time. By specifying the website timezone, stats will now appear correctly in your timezone. Similarly, API requests requesting data for 'today' or 'yesterday' will be converted to the correct timezone.
• Support for excluding visits by IP and IP ranges
  You can now specify, by website or in a global list, the IPs to be excluded from being tracked. It also works with IP ranges (eg. 145.5.*.*).
• Support to exclude URL parameters
  You can specify, by website or in a global list, the list of URL parameters to exclude from your URLs. The common session parameters (phpsessid, sessionid, etc.) are automatically excluded. This ensures that your Piwik DB doesn't get filled with thousands of similar URLs, which affects performance and report analysis.
• Support to define the currency displayed, per website
  If you use the Goals plugin to add and track your conversions, revenue used to displayed in $ (USD). You can now specify, by website, which currency should be displayed next to the revenue reports.
• New Global settings screen
  While we don't want to bloat the admin UI with too many preferences, Piwik users with high traffic websites often need to change two settings: enable/disable the archiving process to be triggered automatically when reports are viewed, and define the frequency at which reports must be processed for "today". This means that most users will not need to edit the configuration file anymore… sweet!
• Improvements in Archiving for large scale Piwik installs
  If your Piwik contains hundreds or thousands of websites, Piwik will now work correctly and archive your data without the "memory exhausted" error.
• Live! plugin now works on high traffic websites
  We made some changes in the database structure to ensure your real time visitors dashboard widget display nicely. You can try out the feature on the piwik demo (add the Live! visitors widget in the dashboard)
• Bug fixes
  As with every release, we fixed a few non critical bugs.

Screenshots of new features

User settings screen

Website Management page

Global settings page

Release schedule

If all goes well, Piwik 0.6 will be released at the end of the month, and we will then move on to the next milestone, Piwik 0.7. (You can check out the list of active tickets assigned to each milestone in the roadmap.) We are working towards Piwik 1.0 (see roadmap) with hopefully a release in July this year!

Beta testing instructions

If you can help with beta testing, please go to this forum thread. It explains how to safely try the RC (keeping your production instance safe). All bugs found can be added in the forum thread. Thank you for your support… and have fun!

Piwik is an international open source project. Over the last year, users from over 120 countries have visited piwik.org, downloaded the software, and started using it. Piwik is mainly used by users speaking German, English, French, Chinese, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Dutch, Polish and Japanese but there are many more (the software itself is already translated in 36 languages and growing!)

Piwik.org now available in German

Today, we are proud to release the German version of Piwik.org, hosted at de.piwik.org. The content, documentation, FAQs, etc. has been translated by Peter Boehlke, a German web developer who recently joined the Piwik team. With Germany being the largest Piwik local community, translating the website in German made a lot of sense… Thanks to Peter for his amazing work!

The website is a copy of piwik.org and will be kept up to date by Peter and other participants. You can already register to the German Blog RSS feed to stay up to date with the latest Piwik news.

If you speak and write German and have some experience in web analytics, please consider sharing your knowledge in the Piwik German blog, and become an editor. We hope the blog will be an interesting web analytics resource for German speakers.

Other translations for piwik.org website?

The system we use (Wordpress and WPML, more below) makes it technically very easy to add a new translation to the website. We are actively working on providing piwik.org into other languages. If you are interested by this project, you can check out the Piwik.org website translation page and contact us if you wish to participate – and be the lead – of a new translation. We are very interested to hear from you!

How does the Piwik.org translation work?

Piwik.org is built using WordPress. To add German translations, we're using a plugin called WPML, which allows running a multilingual WordPress site from a single install.

WPML includes a professional translation interface which makes our content management much easier. We can send everything to translation from within WordPress. Our translators do the translations in ICanLocalize's system and the completed translations are automatically sent back to de.piwik.org. To see the plugin in action, check out Wordpress website translation page that explains to website translators how to get started. We are totally in love with this way of working on translations with Wordpress. We never have to edit HTML, copy paste files over both websites. Everything is shared and when we modify a post or a page, it either gets updated automatically (if the system detects that only the HTML changed), or the translator would only need to translate the new sentence. This is very efficient and painless.

Let us know in the comments what you think of de.piwik.org – if you have any suggestion regarding the German content, please contact peter directly at peter AT piwik dot org. Thank you for your support!

We are excited to announce that Piwik is now officially supported by SimpleScripts. SimpleScripts is a one-click installer for websites, blogs, photo galleries and forums, it is the script installer of choice of Bluehost, a popular provider with over half a million hosting customers.

SimpleScripts provides easy one-click install and management of over 50 of the web's top applications, including Wordpress, Joomla, phpBB, Roundcube, Gallery, and more. SimpleScripts is a "hosted service", so you can add applications to your existing web host account, just about anywhere! Try a SimpleScripts Demo today.

As part of the Piwik Marketing Roadmap and our aim to increase the exposure Piwik receives amongst major Web Hosting providers, Piwik was recently added to the SimpleScripts repository. This milestone is very much in line with our vision to make Piwik the best Open Source alternative to Google Analytics. The Support team at SimpleScripts is committed to including updates to Piwik as they become available.

In a few simple steps you can have Piwik up and running in no time. Piwik installation options using SimpleScripts are as follows:

1. Your host supports SimpleScripts:
   • Login to your host account and look for Software/Services.
   • Click on SimpleScripts.
   • Under 'Utilities' software category you will find Piwik. Click on it.
   • Follow the prompts.
2. Your host does not support SimpleScripts:
   • Create a SimpleScripts account.
   • Login into your SimpleScripts account.
   • Under 'Utilities' software category you will find Piwik. Click on it.
   • Follow the prompts.



3. That's it, you are done!

Please email us your experience installing Piwik using Simplescripts together with any other comments at: hello (at) piwik.org

Join our next IRC meetup this coming Thursday! This is an opportunity to participate in discussions on various Piwik initiatives and hear about upcoming releases and project milestones.

Date: Thurs April 1st, 1pm UTC
Duration: 30min
IRC #piwik-dev channel

Agenda:

• Piwik 0.6 release
• Discuss mockups of a potential new piwik UI
• General discussion

To join the chat, you can use the website: http://webchat.freenode.net/ – See also what will be the time in your country at 1pm UTC.

Anyone can join, and if you are interested in participating in the project, this is your chance to introduce yourself and get to know others.

All welcome and hope to see you there!

Previous meetups:

• Piwik IRC meetup #1
• Piwik IRC meetup #2

Update: Meetup Log

(00:00:42) mattab: <meetup>
(00:00:42) mattab: hi everyone
(00:00:56) rschilt: Hi Matt
(00:01:19) mattab: first thing quickly... if there is anybody keen to beta test trunk, that would be great.. I worked on the new timezone feature, and a *lot* of code changed
(00:01:47) mattab: also we added: Ip exclusion (ip, ip ranges), define currency per website
(00:02:18) mattab: and exclude URL query parameters
(00:02:28) mattab: so beta testers welcomed!
(00:03:11) b [~513f5324@gateway/web/freenode/x-aatvhjnstmwmkbes] entered the room.
(00:03:13) bodo1: I will test "currency per website" (as it's my feature request)
(00:03:18) rschilt: re the timezone ticket... onya Matt!
(00:03:39) b is now known as Guest552
(00:03:45) mattab: The main topic today is the new piwik UI design; check out the main screenshot at: http://dev.piwik.org/trac/attachment/ticket/1154/Dashboard%20overview%20with%20website%20selector.png
(00:03:45) mattab: The ticket about this new design is http://dev.piwik.org/trac/ticket/1154
(00:04:11) mattab: So everyone... what do you think about this?
(00:04:53) hebbet: looks a little like wordpress admin
(00:05:17) glogiotatidis: i think is nice, clean and stylish
(00:05:21) rschilt: I like the mascot (our little birdie friend)
(00:05:33) mattab: it's just a mockup at the moment, so we have plenty of room for improvements, so the next step is to get your feedback, ask the designer to modify it, and submit a new mockup
(00:05:49) mattab: critics welcomed
(00:06:31) rschilt: What about setting number of columns?
(00:06:45) mattab: what should be improved? what looks ugly? what looks hard to read, understand?
(00:07:04) ReneLux: Very clean nice template
(00:07:24) Mariusz: selecting website by search? (upper right corner)
(00:07:31) mattab: rschilt, columns are set using the view "standard" (2 columns), "all columns" showing all columns (visits, pages, bounce rate, etc.) or the "Goals" view (goal revenue, conversion rate, etc).
(00:08:15) mattab: yes selecting website by search will be in the new design, it's actually already implemented in http://dev.piwik.org/trac/ticket/288
(00:08:45) glogiotatidis: selecting website by search looks strange to me too
(00:08:55) glogiotatidis: maybe we can also have a drop down list?
(00:08:55) rschilt: matt - where does one set "view"
(00:09:19) mattab: website: by default, there will be a dropdown of like 10 or 15 websites. But you can also search
(00:09:50) mattab: currently it's using the icons below the widget tables, it's a bit confusing I agree
(00:10:30) glogiotatidis: ok nice
(00:10:36) Mariusz: looks really great. minimalistic, clear and clean design
(00:12:00) Mariusz: since there was a question in the forum. Do you plan to provide template other than the default one?
(00:12:51) mattab: There is a ticket, but work hasn't started on it: http://dev.piwik.org/trac/ticket/177
(00:13:35) mattab: it's really an intro ticket, because specifications need to be written regarding how this could be implemented..
(00:14:14) rschilt: sorry Matt.... not clear on your answer re specifying number of columns. In Wordpress one can specify number of columns displayed on Dashboard via "screen options" - is there a similar feature planned for Piwik?
(00:14:51) mattab: no, just the current feature of having 3 different views (standard, all columns, goal view)
(00:17:21) mattab: any other suggestion of improvements?
(00:17:55) rschilt: perhaps some choices re colour schemes?
(00:18:55) mattab: good point, we can ask for this
(00:19:15) vilmonts [~c16deb9e@gateway/web/freenode/x-qdyxlwdcmionzpkt] entered the room.
(00:19:25) vilmonts left the room.
(00:20:38) mattab: we'll post a blog post asking for feedback too
(00:20:39) rschilt: Matt - I'm looking but still cannot find where I change and set the 3 different views. Perhaps this could be improved in the new UI
(00:26:41) rschilt: seems to me that it needs to be an option available visible at the top of the screen and all the time (similar to "screen options" in Wordprfess) to control number of columns in the dashboard
(00:29:56) mattab: keep the feedback coming on the ticket if you have any! this is the right time to suggest improvements for piwik UI :)
(00:00:42) mattab: </meetup>