# Open source web analytics

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!

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This entry was posted by Piwik team on Thursday, April 15th, 2010 ; category Community, Development ; RSS comments.