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Piwik had yesterday its most busy day ever: 2572 visits!! This is more than 15 times the average day. What happened?

I’m not sure about the blog(s) that started it all, but it seems the articles on incubaweb and seoprofessional did spread the word about piwik worldwide; there were articles written about piwik in polish, italian, english, spanish, french, german yesterday!

Then Piwik got featured on delicious Popular page, which brought not less than 750 direct visits and hundred of undirect visits (via feed readers, websites aggregators, etc.).

See yesterday traffic spike (it is very easy to get such graphs in piwik and publish them everywhere if you wish)

Thanks to all the people who wrote / spread the word about Piwik, it really helps us.The beta version is due before April 2008. Stay tuned!See also the related article : Welcome Japan!

This presentation will describe why Piwik, the open source web analytics software, can be a better alternative than the other web analytics tools available (google analytics, clicky, etc.).

This presentation illustrates 5 important key features of Piwik:

1. Open APIs
2. Plugins Architecture
3. Data abstraction layer
4. Customizable dashboard
5. Innovative User Interface

More information:

• Web analytics overview… and Piwik
• Download last version
• Try it now! (online demo)

Here is a presentation we did to present Piwik to an audience in a french engineering school. I gives a simple overview of

• what web analytics is
  • measure
  • analyze
  • act
• piwik competitors (google analytics, clicky, etc.)
• why Piwik is better than the competition
  • Open Apis
  • Plugins architecture
  • Powerful data abstraction layer
  • Innovative user interface
  • Customizable dashboard with widgets

Today Piwik was featured on Moongift.jp! Moongift, as far as my japanese goes (not far enough :), is a tech blog about free softwares, and is very popular in japan. Indeed piwik.org statistics have jumped and there are many japanese fellows on the website! We hope you will try and enjoy piwik. Thanks moongift for the nice article.

See the moongift effect on the last visitors graph (it is very easy to get such graphs in piwik and publish them everywhere if you wish)

This brings us to an important issue for all our international users: translations. Piwik is aiming to be the leading open source web analytics software, and it goes with having translations in many languages. It is not yet possible to translate piwik but is on the roadmap and internationalization will be a feature coming in the next few months.Stay tuned for a public beta version (coming very soon!)If you know other international top blogs which speak about piwik, tell us. If you have a blog… then feel free to blog about piwik!

When I started to design Piwik I read a lot about APIs, software architecture, service oriented architecture (soa), etc. I really wanted to design a modular architecture that would make it easy to request any data and perform any action from outside the user interface.

Technically speaking, Piwik has been built on the top of Apis. Everything that does some logic in Piwik is available through an API. We basically open all these APIs via a REST API. Of course you must authenticate for some calls eg. when deleting a user. In ther user interface, the AJAX requests are directed to the API module that returns data in HTML or JSON format (javascript friendly).

Main concepts I tried to apply when designing the API:

• Easy to learn ; the documentation provides simple examples, complete documentation
• Easy to use ; single entry point, standard parameters
• Hard to misuse ; explicit error message suggesting parameters values
• Appropriate to audience ; I had chats about such a service with several phpmyvisites users, and I looked at what the competition was offering

Interesting resources that helped me have a better understanding of the topic:

• How to design a good API and why it matters? Great PDF presentation by a google engineer that I really enjoyed
• How to add an API to your webservice? Interesting read
• Audience drived based API design
• The art of building a reusable class library. A great presentation by a microsoft engineer ; be ready for the 237 slides!! (that’s a reason you end up working for microsoft when you like powerpoint so much!)

Of course to design a good API you should have a look at existing APIs, and even use some of them:

• A great example: Flickr API ; see an example of a method documentation ; try the API explorer for this method
• Mediawiki API
• A more complex example: Ebay API ; see an example of a method documentation (yes it’s impressive!!)
• A directory of existing APIs on programmable web
• Amazon API: example of the method ItemSearch
• And last but not least the Piwik API ; the best web analytics API that makes it easy to request anything from your best keywords, your top pages or the number of visits of the last 30 days, yesterday, or the previous 5 months. Give it a try.

If you have good resources or advice, feel free to post a comment

The mission statement of Piwik is « To create, as a community, the leading international open source web analytics application, providing access to all functionality through open components and open APIs. »

The keyword here is “open APIs“. It is very important for us that Piwik’s users can access their data very easily. The problem with a service such as Google Analytics is that you don’t own your data, you can only access it through the limited user interface the service provides. During the last weeks we’ve worked hard to implement and finalize the API concept in Piwik.

Piwik APIs makes it easy to get:

• the search engines keywords used during the last week
• the top 5 browsers of the current year
• the top 10 pages of your website that contain the string “blog”, ordered by number of visits ascending
• the list of the websites registered in Piwik or the list of users that have an admin access on the website no 4
• and a lot more!

I’ve added a tutorial “How to get the top 10 keywords of yesterday in XML?” It’s as simple as this url. Of course with PHP or any other langage you can very easily print out the result with the colors/fonts you want (see an example on this page and the example source code). You can request the data in XML / JSON / PHP / CSV / as a RSS feed / HTML.

See the full documentation on the API reference page. Many examples are provided.

With the API you can build widgets, display your web statistics in your blog sidebar, access piwik data from any other dashboard, etc.

If you have examples of people using the APIs leave a comment. Happy coding!

We are in the process of making it as easy as possible for new developers to join us in making Piwik the best open source web analytics software. We are doing our best writing documentation so people get an overview of the project and can get started without pain.

In this process we wrote a little article “How to setup Eclipse + PHP + Debug on Windows” ; it gives the directions to install Web server (php/mysql) + Eclipse + PHP support + SVN support + Debugging tools (to breakpoint, print variable, etc. in php code). Following this article it should take less than 1 hour to have a working development environment and be able to debug your PHP code.

We are now working on documentation concerning the software architecture, how Piwik works for storing the visitors information, how the files are organized within the project, etc. Stay tuned!

More information on the development page.

Piwik is the next version of phpMyVisites ; after 4 years of good services for phpMyVisites, we decided to start a new open source project that would benefit from the phpMyVisites’ experience, but with a better architecture, better interface, and an application which

1. is easy to modify and add new features with plugins
2. is providing access to all the data via open APIs
3. has an easy to customize interface with an architecture based on widgets

We still have work to do especially on point 3, on which we will be working hard the next weeks.

But we shall release an alpha version very soon so that you can try the new Piwik and tell us your opinion about it!

If you’re a developer and are willing to help with the development, tell us, we have some interesting projects to suggest.

Happy new year 2008!!!