Integrate Piwik into your Rails Application

piwik_analytics is a Gem for Ruby on Rails 3.x. After installing Piwik on your server and creating a website, you get a JavaScript tracking tag that you have to include in your website. When working with Rails the tracking tag will most likely be embedded in the application.html.erb view. It is not very convenient to include [...]

Piwik 0.6.4

We have just released Piwik 0.6.4, a maintenance release with a new plugin.

• NEW Design!
  Thanks to the mockups from Marcin Gałęcki and the hard work of Stepan Sukharyna, sponsored by German Agency Vorwärts GmbH, we are now introducing the new UI in Piwik 0.6.4. We hope you enjoy the new professional look. We also tried to make it easier to use, let us know what you think using the Forums or feedback forms.
• FASTER User Interface
  Julien Moumné, developer from the Piwik team, implemented Javascript and CSS merge and minification. Instead of fetching all JS/CSS files separately, Piwik now builds one single file, ensuring the UI is fast and very responsive.
• The SEO plugin
  New Dashboard Widget, contributed by Victor Dibia, that displays the website’s PageRank, Yahoo Backlinks, number of indexes pages, Alexa rank and the domain age, for the website URL recorded in Piwik.

• Simple Image Tracker
  You can track visitors that don’t use JavaScript using a simple embed image (1×1 pixel) code into a website.
• PHP Piwik Tracking API
  You can now track visitors that don’t have JavaScript enabled using http tracking API. PHP based websites can use the new tracking client to track their users.
  This is useful in environments where JavaScript cannot be used (e.g. mobile platforms, eBay pages).
• New tests and huge QA effort
  Anthon setup Jenkins for continuous build integration. Matt added full sets of integration tests, ensuring we always know when we break Piwik tracking, API, Archiving logic.
  Integration tests, unit tests, webtests (testing the installation in a fake browser) and Javascript tests (testing piwik.js) are running after each SVN commit and send message to a list and the developer. These are a major improvements in our Quality Assurance effort, to ensure a stable and bugfree Piwik 1.0.
• WAA Compliance
  We reviewed Web Analytics Association specifications, and ensured Piwik is compliant with the latest WAA specs.
• Dashboard widgets will now remember the View type you last clicked and will restore the exact same dashboard each visit.
• Many bug fixes and improvements

For Piwik users updating to 0.6.4

• Security fix: Thank you to Enrico Razza who found and reported to the Piwik team security@piwik.org a vulnerability in Piwik also fixed in 0.6.4.

List of tickets closed in this milestone

• #100        Plugin for SEO piwik: alexa, google pagerank, incoming links
• #1452     Regression: Installer doesn’t try and create the DB anymore
• #1446     Provide ‘Non Javascript Tracking tag’ and document Tracking push API to piwik.php
• #818     Setup continuous integration server for Piwik builds
• #396     Make sure Piwik complies with WAA definitions
• #660     Make Piwik UI faster: merge all Javascript and CSS files together, minify, cache the merged files on disk
• #1154     Mockups of new design for the Piwik UI (dasboard, tables, graphs)
• #1443     Remove from language files lines that don’t have the correct number of %s parameters
• #1481     Activating plugin requires re-login.
• #1451     Apache+Rails: malformed REQUEST_URI
• #1444     CSS conflict in feedback form
• #1456     Sorting in API without order
• #90     Widgets should be able to persist some parameters (eg. viewDataTable)
• #1447     Error in core/Tracker/Db/Mysqli.php
• #1425     Regression: feedback popup content is loaded by default
• #1438     Smarty template_c files should be purged on plugin install/uninstall
• #1442     Replace Html Quickform for GPL compatibility
• #973     Plugins hook to control the order of entries in the menu
• #1327     Write Tracker, Archiving and API integration tests.
• #1472     Super user password reset should alert user when config file not writable
• #1467     Problem with html-entities in translation
• #1297     Improve the Visitors > Overview report
• #1479     SEO plugin doesn’t catch errors.
• #1484     Bug in download tracking when no other page views
• #1487     Using PHP classes to call API seems broken
• #1485     Piwik plugins define their API metadata
• #1449     Zend Framework update to 1.10.6
• #1440     Make Piwik_Tracker_Visit::handleKnownVisit hookable
• #1403     Refactoring the menu classes and adding top menu hookable
• #1457     Notice: undefined constant E_EXCEPTION
• #1461     tmp/latest/LATEST: Unit test regression
• #1464     Yearly evolution doesn’t show unique visitos
• #1357     endless HTTP 302 Moved Temporarily loop instead of login form
• #1480     getTablesInstalled: underscore in prefix matches any character
• #1473     Installation – warning if mbstring extension not enabled
• #1471     Configure PIWIK_URL and PIWIK_HOST in global.ini.php
• #1469     File integrity check errors when files not uploaded in binary mode
• #1340     Installer/Updater: check all directories writeable

Piwik 0.6.3

We have just released Piwik 0.6.3, a maitenance release with a some exciting new features.

• NEW! Goal Plugin is now stable and enabled by default
  We have finished the work on the Goal plugin backend and User Interface. You can now create several Goals by website (eg. ‘Read my page About’ matching url ‘/about/’).
  For each Goal, you will get reports of how the Goal conversions are performing over the last few days or months, but also across your segments: countries, server time, keywords, search engine, website, campaign keyword, etc.
  The Goal overview dashboard gives you a quick overview of all your Goals and you can view detailed reports for each goal.
  Advanced users can also specify a value for each Goal (eg. the Goal ‘Newsletter subscribe’ is worth $1). For Ecommerce items or items with a dynamic price, you can also set the exact price by using the Javascript API function trackGoal().
  You can check out the full user documentation about Tracking Goals in Piwik,
• Piwik Archiving script on Windows, scaling Piwik on Windows just did get a lot easier as Piwik now comes with a PowerShell script that you can use to perform the archiving process.
  Check out the updated How to setup Piwik for larger websites which now includes instructions for Windows users.

• The Visitor Generator, a new Plugin that replaces the former generateVisits.php has been added to the core (but plugin is disabled by default) and allows the superuser to generate fake visit data. This is useful if you want to see in more details how Piwik works without real data, and very useful for developers working and testing Piwik.

For Piwik users updating to 0.6.3

• Known bug: on the Piwik dashboard in 0.6.3, you might see a “Widget not found”.
  Please remove this widget and add the same widget “Visits > Last Visits graph” again after the Piwik update.
• User affected by “Piwik 1 is available” message: Users affected are running PHP 5.2.0 (and above) with either safe_mode enabled or open_basedir set, and using the curl extension. You can patch your existing Piwik installation manually since the “one-click” update would fail in this case. We recommend that affected 0.6.2 users replace piwik/core/Http.php with the new version.
  Note: You may have to wait up to 8 hrs for the cached version number to update.

List of tickets closed in this milestone

• #774       Finish the Goal Tracking plugin
• #1152     Deprecate redundant use of plugin getName()
• #1351     Check and translate errors/exceptions displayed on screen or returned in API calls
• #1371     generateVisits.php – idSite parameter never in request, defaulting to idSite = 1
• #1372     Failing requests are not handled properly (jsoncallback, Content-Type, HTTP code)
• #1374     VisitorGenerator plugin
• #1386     Update to Zend Framework 1.10.5
• #1389     Sparklines in Visitors>Overview>Bounce rates does not work (regression)
• #1390     Use UNSIGNED INT for ip
• #1391     Update script typos
• #1392     remove seekport search engine
• #1393     sendHttpRequest() erroneously returning “1″
• #1394     changes to searchalot.com search engine
• #1399     Browsers by Family: pie chart too small; bar chart labels overlap
• #1402     Unnecessary code in Login/Controller logme()
• #1408     New Search engine: duckduckgo.com
• #1410     E_STRICT – Declaration of Piwik_Archive_Array::loadMetadata() incompatible
• #1412     Fatal error: Class ‘Piwik_Common’ not found in … core/Piwik.php on line 0
• #1413     UserAgentParser: Safari 4.1 and 5 released
• #1414     Update to jQuery UI 1.8.2
• #1415     Handle misconfigured config directory and file permissions
• #1416     IIS: web.config only allows installation in /piwik subdir
• #1418     UserAgentParser: handling malformed user agents
• #1420     Actions -> Pages hangs (Loading…)
• #1421     Handling/Detecting eval() disabled by suhosin
• #1426     Google Earth 5.2 – embedded webkit browser
• #1427     User settings configuration report table is not bounded
• #1428     The Actions > Page URLs and Page titles reports should have pagination
• #1431     Flock now based on Chromium and Webkit
• #1433     ArchiveProcessing unit test failing
• #1437     Fatal Error in archiver with Turkish locale
• #1439     Handle archive.sh using php-cgi
• Updated Bulgarian, German, Greek, French, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian translations

Note: you might encounter in some rare cases, the known bug Call to undefined method Piwik::getLoginPluginName()

Release of Piwik 0.6.2

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 [...]

Piwik 0.6.2

We are excited to announce the immediate availability of Piwik 0.6.2.

New features in this release

• New report: Entry pages and Exit pages. You can now see for each page the number of entrances and exits, the bounce rate and exit rate.
• In the Pages reports (Pages, Entry pages, Exit pages) you can now click on the icon to open the actual URL tracked in another tab.
• Added CSV exports that import well in Excel: check out the new TSV (Excel) export link.
• Added the complete set of favicons for search engines.

Tickets closed in this milestone

• #306     Add entry / exit / time per page URL in the Actions > Pages report
• #426     Google CSE should appear as Google CSE in search engines result
• #541     How to pronounce Piwik?
• #556     Add a link to the URL in the Actions > Pages report.
• #950     “Loading data” position change not restored
• #969     “Search” functionality doesn’t apply to subtables
• #1062     IE8 (native mode) regression: clicking on the table rows doesn’t show the sub tables
• #1153     when config file is not writable, display a warning message
• #1235     Update to jquery 1.4.2 and jquery-ui 1.8.1
• #1259     sum_time_spent is not always set in API responses for some rows
• #1283     Bing image Search
• #1300     (X)HTML elements don’t have unique ids
• #1322     Add a “CSV for Excel” download link
• #1343     Fix missing translations in CoreHome
• #1344     Fix missing translations in Goals plugin
• #1345     Piwik One Click Update fails with bogus error if curl_exec times out
• #1346     Re-opening Feedback form may display previous successfully sent or error message
• #1347     Undefined index: excluded_parameters in Action.php
• #1348     Google images not detected anymore
• #1350     Adding missing search engine favicons
• #1352     Fixing missing translation in MultiSites
• #1354     Fix missing translations in title tag of several header.tpl
• #1359     PHP 5.1.6 errors if EXPERIMENTAL_DATE_SUPPORT enabled
• #1360     File integrity check regression – first error discarded
• #1364     Exclude by Cookie – configureable cookie name and path
• #1365     Update Google Icon
• #1367     ExampleFeedburner broken
• #1369     Visitor Generator generates Future Visits
• #1376     “Ignore” cookie works only for current website
• #1378     PHP 5.1.6 notices and errors
• #1381     Add missing Google domains / URLs
• #1383     Search engine update for 3721.com and Yahoo! China
• #1384     Overrideable Content-Type for Piwik_View
• #1387     Search engines: remove duplicate and dead links