Matomo 1.12, New Features, API Improvements, Stability — The Last Matomo 1.X Release

Contents

We are very excited to announce the immediate availability of Matomo (Piwik) v1.12!

Matomo v1.12 is a major new release with four big new features, seven smaller new features, several API improvements and all together 82 tickets fixed. This is also the last major 1.X release, which means after this release we will be working on releasing Matomo 2.0. This also means that you should upgrade to PHP 5.3 or higher if you haven’t already, since Matomo 2.0 will only support PHP 5.3 and above.

Finally, this release contains two breaking changes to the API. If you use the Matomo API click here or scroll down to see if you’re affected.

Table of Contents:

New Big Feature – Beta Release Channel

beta_channel_settings

For those of you who want to help test Matomo 2.0-beta releases as soon as they come up, we’ve made it easier to use our beta releases. Navigate to the Settings > General Settings page and click the The latest beta release radio button. You will then be able to upgrade to beta releases.

This isn’t truly a major feature, but we think it’s just as important because it will allow us to create more beta releases and thus catch more bugs before we make a final release. This means more releases and more stability for you.

New Big Feature – Segment Editor

Custom Segment Editor with Custom Variable segmentation

The Segment Editor is a long-awaited new feature that allows you to view, save and edit your segments.

Matomo has supported segmentation (filtering visits and reports by arbitrary criteria, like browser family) for quite some time now, but it has never been possible to visually create and modify them. Nor could they be saved for later recall.

Thanks to the eighty individuals and company who funded this feature, it is now possible to:

  • visually segment your visitors, instead of creating URLs.
  • save segments and easily switch between them, instead of remembering URLs.
  • get suggestions for segments that might be helpful to view.
  • learn more in the Segmentating Analytics reports user documentation..

New Big Feature – Page Speed Reports

You can now see how long it took your webserver to generate and send pages over HTTP through the new Avg. Generation Time metric.

This metric can be viewed on both the Pages and Page Titles reports:

avg_generation_time_page_urls

And the average page generation time for all the pages in your website/webapp is displayed on the visitors overview:

avg_generation_time_overview

You can use this new information to benchmark your webapp and web server.

New Big Feature – Device Detection Reports

Matomo 1.12 also includes a new plugin that provides reports on the device types (tablet, desktop, smartphone, etc.), device brands (Apple, Google, Samsung, etc.) and device models (iPad, Nexus 7, etc.) your visitors use to access your website:

device_reports

The new plugin also enhances Operating system detections (detecting sub versions of Linux, Windows, and more).

Note: This plugin is not enabled by default, but will be in Matomo 2.0. If you want to view these reports now, you can activate the plugin in the Installed Plugins admin page. Navigate to Visitors > Devices to see the new reports. You may also use the new (beta) ‘Device type’.

Other improvements

Majestic SEO Metrics

seo_stats_with_majestic

We’ve added two new SEO metrics to the SEO widget, both of which are calculated by MajesticSEO.com. These metrics will tell you the number of external backlinks (the number of links to your site from other sites) and the number of referrer domains (the number of domains that link to your site).

We thank the team at Majestic for their support and hard work in bringing you these metrics to your Matomo dashboards!

Real-time Visitor Count Dashboard Widget

Real time visitor counter

There is now a simple new widget you can use to see the number of visitors, visits and actions that occurred in the last couple minutes. We call it the Real Time Visitor Counter!

New segment parameter: siteSearchKeyword.

There is now a new segment parameter you can use to segment your visits: siteSearchKeyword. This parameter will let you select visits that had site searches with a specific keyword.

Ignore URL letter case when importing log files.

We’ve added a new option to the log import script, –force-lowercase-path. When used, the importer will change URL paths to lowercase before tracking them. This way http://domain.com/MY/BLOG will be treated the same as http://domain.com/my/blog.

Updated ISP Names

pretty_provider_names

We’ve also modified the Providers report so prettier and more up-to-date names of ISPs are displayed.

Customize the background/text/axis color of graphs.

custom_image_graph_colors

It is now possible to change the background color, text color and/or axis color of the graph images generated by the ImageGraph plugin. To access this functionality, use the following URL query parameters when generating an image:

  • backgroundColor
  • textColor
  • axisColor

For example:

http://demo.matomo.cloud/index.php?module=API&method=ImageGraph.get&idSite=7&apiModule=UserSettings&apiAction=getBrowser&token_auth=anonymous&period=day&date=2013-03-21,2013-04-19&language=en&width=779&height=150&fontSize=9&showMetricTitle=0&aliasedGraph=1&legendAppendMetric=0&backgroundColor=efefef&gridColor=dcdcdc&colors=cb2026

Send your users to a custom URL after they logout.

If you manage a Matomo installation with many users and you want to send them to a custom page or website after they log out of Matomo, you can now specify the URL to redirect users after they log out.

API Changes and Improvements

BREAKING CHANGE – renamed segment parameters.

The following segment parameters have been renamed:

  • continent renamed to: continentCode
  • browserName renamed to: browserCode
  • operatingSystem renamed to: operatingSystemCode
  • lat renamed to: latitude
  • long renamed to: longitude
  • region renamed to: regionCode
  • country renamed to: countryCode
  • continent renamed to: continentCode

If you use one of the old segment parameter names, Matomo will throw an exception, so you should notice when you’re using an old name.

BREAKING CHANGE – changes to the input & output of the Live.getLastVisitsDetails method.

The following changes were made to the Live.getLastVisitsDetails API method:

  • The method no longer uses the maxIdVisit query parameter. It has been replaced by the filter_offset parameter.
  • Site search keywords are now displayed in a <siteSearchKeyword> element. They were formerly in <pageTitle> elements.
  • Custom variables with page scope now have ‘Page’ in their element names when displayed. For example, <customVariablePageName1>, <customVariablePageName2>, etc.

Filter results of MultiSites.getAll by website name.

It is now possible to filter the results of MultiSites.getAll by website name. To do this, set the pattern query parameter to the desired regex pattern.

Get suggested values to use for a segment parameter.

The new API method API.getSuggestedValuesForSegment can now be used to get suggested values for a segment parameter. This method will return a list of the most seen values (in the last 60 days) for a certain segment parameter. So for browserCode, this would return the codes for the browsers most visitors used in the last 60 days.

Use extra tracking query parameters with the JS tracker (such as ‘lat’ & ‘long’).

We’ve added a new method to the JavaScript tracker named appendToTrackingUrl. You can use this method to add extra query parameters to a tracking request, like so:

_paq.push(['appendToTrackingUrl', 'lat=X&long=Y']);

What we’re working on

As we said above, Matomo v1.12 is the last in the 1.X series of releases. This means we are now officially working on Matomo 2.0.

Matomo 2.0 will be a big release, to be sure, but it’s going to bring you more than just a couple new features and a bag of bug fixes. For Matomo 2.0 we will be revisiting the user needs and the ideals that originally prompted us to create Matomo in order to build our vision of the future of web analytics.

Matomo 2.0 won’t just be a bigger, better web app, but a new platform for observing and analyzing the things that matter to you.

Participate in Matomo

Are you a talented developer or an experienced User Interface designer? Or maybe you like to write documentation or are a marketing guru?

If you have some free time and if you want to contribute to one of the most awesome open source projects around, please get in touch with the Matomo team, or read this page to learn more?

Summary

For the full list of changes in Matomo 1.12 check out the Changelog.

Thank you to the core developers, all the beta testers and users, our official supporters, the translators & everyone who reported bugs or feature requests. Also thank you to softwares we use, and the libraries we use.

If you are a company and would like to help an important project like Matomo grow, please get in touch, it means a lot to us. You can also participate in the project ?

–> if you like what you read, please tell your friends and colleagues or write on your website, blog, forums, stackoverflow, etc. <–

Peace. Enjoy!

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A powerful web analytics platform that gives you and your business 100% data ownership and user privacy protection.

No credit card required.

Free forever.