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Pre-announcement : Piwik Marketplace soon open for paid premium features
12 octobre 2016, par Piwik Core Team — CommunityUpdates: Premium Plugins now available on the Piwik Analytics Marketplace. Further announcements about premium plugins: 1) Powerful Video Analytics and Audio Analytics and 2) A/B Testing Platform for Piwik Analytics.
The goal of the Piwik project is to build the best open digital analytics platform that lets you measure what matters to you while giving you full control of your data. The beauty of the Piwik Analytics platform is that it can be customized and extended by building or installing new features on top of the Piwik core.
On our open Piwik Marketplace you can already discover and download over 70 free plugins which enrich the functionality of your Piwik in many ways, and themes which change the look and feel of the Piwik user interface. To help users make more of their analytics data and ultimately be more successful, in a few weeks we will offer you the possibility to purchase subscriptions for premium features in the Marketplace.
Get more out of your Piwik
Opening the Marketplace for paid plugins will bring more premium and enterprise features so you get more out of your Piwik, when you need it. It will also help us, the Piwik team, to further innovate and improve the open-source Piwik platform to realize our mission:
“To create the leading Free and open source analytics platform, and to support global organisations and communities to keep full control over their data.”
1-click installation and update
You will find the new premium features when you browse the Marketplace in your Piwik app and on our Piwik Marketplace website. Purchased plugins will be installable and updatable with one click, just like you are used to from free plugins.
Sell your plugins on the Piwik Marketplace
If you are a developer who wants to sell plugins on our Marketplace, please get in touch. As a vendor you will be able to see reports about your sales, upload new versions of your plugins, reply to pre-sales and support questions, and more. By tapping into the Marketplace’s infrastructure and distribution, including secure payments and distributing plugins to customers, developers can focus on building great products.
Get started developing plugins
If you are wondering how to get started developing plugins, check out our getting started developer guide and our guide about how to get your plugin ready for the Marketplace.
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Piwik 3 Development Update #4 – Important notes and breaking changes
As mentioned in the previous development updates #1 New UI design, API changes & release date, #2 Git master branch will become Piwik 3 and #3 Marketplace we are actively working on the Piwik 3 update and we will release a first beta of it soon. While the update brings many new features and bugfixes, it also comes with some important changes that may require your attention which we detail in this blog post.
Database updates
To keep Piwik upgrades as easy as possible, we have usually avoided database schema changes that affect large tables during the Piwik 2.X release cycle. The Piwik 3 update will however require several database updates in order to fix some limitations and bugs in the Piwik database schema. If you have a fair amount of traffic and/or large Piwik database, we recommend to execute the database updates for Piwik 3 on the command line.
If you struggle updating Piwik you can also get in touch with the Piwik Support and ask for a quote so we can help you with upgrading.
New server & browser Requirements
Piwik 3 updates the server requirements. Piwik 3 now requires:
- PHP 5.5.9 or newer (we used to require PHP 5.3+),
- MySQL 5.5 or newer or MariaDB (we used to require MySQL 4.1+).
If you are still on an old PHP and MySQL version we highly recommend to update directly to PHP 7 and a recent MySQL version (MySQL 5.7+).
Piwik 3 also drops support for the older browsers IE8 and IE9.
Default filter_limit now applies to all HTTP API methods (#8458)
In the past the default
filter_limitof100rows was applied to HTTP API methods that return a report. This means that by default:- when you requested a method like
SitesManager.getAllSites,UsersManager.getUsersorGoals.getGoals(which are not reports), we returned all rows. - when you fetched a report like
Actions.getPageUrls(which is a report), the result was limited to 100 rows.
This behaviour was inconsistent and it was hard to understand which methods apply the default limit and which did not. We now apply the default limit to all HTTP API methods by default.
If your API consumer or app needs to fetch all results for an API method, you can append the following parameter to the URL:
&filter_limit=-1. Alternatively, if you wish to change the defaultfilter_limitautomatically for all APIs, you can override theAPI_datatable_default_limitconfig setting in yourconfig/config.ini.phpfile.For more information about the various APIs parameters you can use, see Piwik Analytics HTTP API Reference.
Proxy client IP detection (#10342)
This is only important if you are using the
proxy_client_headers[]config in theconfig/config.ini.phpfile, ie. your Piwik server is behind a proxy.When Piwik is set up to fetch the client IP address from the proxy headers, and the header contained more than one IP address, we used to use the last IP address. From Piwik 3 we will be using the first IP address which is in line with the protocol definition. For example if
HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FORcontains multiple IP addresses, we now use the first IP instead of the last one.Writable Piwik JavaScript Tracker file piwik.js
From Piwik 3 we recommend to have the file
/piwik.jswritable in your Piwik directory, so that the PHP and webserver processes can edit this file. It is not required to have the file writable for Piwik to function well, but we are working on some enhanced features that will only work when the file is writable. If you don’t know whether this file is writable, go to “Administration => System Check” as a Super User and Piwik will display a warning if the file is not writable. If needed, you might be able to make the file writable by executing a command likechmod 0755 piwik.jsorchown $webuser piwik.js(on Linux).Changes for plugin developers
In the previous development updates we have already introduced some of the changes that affect Piwik plugin developers. We have made several improvements to the Marketplace that allow developers to promote their plugin better and to maintain their plugin page easier. We have also created a migration guide for plugin developers to make it easier to migrate a plugin to Piwik 3.
For a list of all changes have a look at the developer changelog.
Until our next Piwik 3 update, be well, and Happy Analytics!
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Piwik 3 Development Update #3 – Marketplace for Piwik Analytics
This is our latest Piwik 3 development update where we present all changes that will be shipped with Piwik 3. Learn more about the exciting projects under progress in our Piwik 3 dev update #1 and dev update #2.
The Piwik Marketplace is the place where you can discover & download plugins to enrich the functionality of your Piwik, and themes to change the look and feel of your Piwik user interface. In preparation for our Piwik 3 release we have made several improvements to the Marketplace:
- Users can now view more information for a given plugin, such as a link to an online demo, a video demo, how to obtain support from the Plugin’s developer(s), and more.
- Users can now view which plugins are compatible with the most recent Piwik version, for example view which plugins are already compatible with Piwik 3.
- Plugin developers can now 1) promote their plugin better, 2) easily define requirement(s) for their plugins using composer.json version constraints (a best practise most developers already use) and 3) developers can define which files and directories should be excluded from the publicly available plugin zip packages.
These improvements will make it easier for you to discover new Piwik Analytics plugins to achieve your goals.
Marketplace now supports different Piwik versions
You can now filter plugins by Piwik version to see only plugins that are compatible with your Piwik.
When you browse the Marketplace in the Piwik app itself, you will automatically only see plugins and updates that are compatible with your Piwik.Better plugin preview
Plugin developers are able to display screenshots for their plugins, and now plugin developers can also specify a demo URL and a video in the “plugin.json” file. Adding a video to your plugin allows users to get a much better understanding of what your plugin does and how a theme looks.
Unified support page
In the past a developer had to define the text that was displayed on the support page. This often resulted in blank support pages or developers only showed an email address. With this new update, links and other support information are displayed in a standardised way as specified in the “support” section of the “plugin.json” file. A developer can now define links to an issue tracker, a wiki, the plugin’s source code and more.
License files
The license name on your plugin’s page is now clickable and can show the license text for your plugin. To define a license text for your plugin, create a file named
LICENSE,LICENSE.mdorLICENSE.txt.FAQ and Documentation
In the past a “FAQ” tab was displayed if such a section was present in the plugin’s readme file. This was hard to understand and sometimes ended up in long readme files. Now we pick up the FAQ content from a
docs/faq.mdfile.For plugins developers who wish to provide a user guide(s), it is now possible to show a “documentation” tab to the plugin page by specifying a
docs/index.mdfile.Changelog
When you define a file named
CHANGELOG,CHANGELOG.mdorCHANGELOG.txtin your plugin, we will show the content of this file in a tab “Changelog” on your plugin’s page. Before it was needed to specify the content of the changelog in the readme file.Exclude files from the plugin
If your plugin source code contains files that are not supposed to be present on a Piwik installation you can now choose to exclude files and directories from your plugin zip archive. When a user installs your plugin the excluded files won’t be there.
Migrating your plugin for Piwik 3
We recommend to all plugin developers to specify in the
plugin.jsonfile whether their plugin is compatible with Piwik 3 or not. If your plugin defines a “Changelog”, “Support” or “FAQ” section in theREADME.mdfile we recommend to migrate this to the new structure. Read more about this in the migration guide.Until our next Piwik 3 dev update, Happy analysis!
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Piwik 3 Development Update #2 – Git master branch will become Piwik 3
As mentioned in the Piwik 3 Development Update #1 we are actively working on the new major Piwik 3 release.
This blog post is an announcement regarding an upcoming change on our Git repository.
On October 4th CET, we will merge the current changes done for Piwik 3 from the “3.x-dev” branch into the “master“ branch across our Piwik projects and plugin repositories. While this is not important for most of our users, it can be a problem if you have installed and deployed Piwik from git.
- If you are currently on “master” branch and want to continue using Piwik 2, you need to checkout the newly created “2.x-dev” branch instead of “master” anytime within the next 4 weeks. Don’t forget to update your scripts and scheduled tasks (cronjobs) that may reference “master” branch.
- If you want to receive an early version of Piwik 3 via git automatically, you won’t have to change anything.
The final Piwik 3 release will be ready before the end of the year. If you want to give it a try, you can either use Piwik from Git and check out the “3.x-dev” branch, or download Piwik 3 from GitHub.
Until our next Piwik 3 dev update, Happy analysis!
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Piwik 3 Development Update #1 – New UI design, API changes & release date
Over the last months, we have been actively working on the Piwik 3 release and we want to introduce you to the changes that we have done so far. They include a new and modern UI redesign, new widgets for your dashboard, and technical improvements under the hood.
New Piwik 3 UI
Based on Material Design we have revamped the user interface which is now more responsive, more usable and faster. While the UI is not yet finished, we invite you to check it out already and to let us know what you think.
This new Piwik material design is a visual language that synthesizes classic principles of good design with the innovation and possibility of technology and science.
More responsive
Piwik 3 will look and feel much better on your mobile phone and tablet. Many elements have been improved: the menus, the segment editor and dashboard selector, the widgets, the settings pages and most other pages so you can fully experience and enjoy Piwik on any device!
Improved usability
We have updated the menu structure, the dashboard selector as well as the footer in reports to make your life easier when using Piwik. We love to keep these complicated things simple. There are also many other tiny improvements that you will appreciate.
The Zen Mode lets you view in full screen your analytics reports and dashboards. Users love this feature and it can now be accessed by pressing “z” key.
Faster
To make the Piwik interface faster, we have refactored most of our CSS, HTML and JavaScript and moved more and more of our code into the client. As a result, Piwik now needs to reload the page much less often! For example when you change the date or change the segment, Piwik will now load the reports instantly. To improve performance even further, Piwik will now load multiple reports on a single page in parallel.
Native fonts
Over the last months more and more web services have started using system fonts, and so will Piwik 3. System fonts look better, improve language support and give you a more native, familiar feeling.
For more details and screenshots have a look at the pull request for the Piwik 3 UI update.
New widgets
With the “Latest Piwik Plugin Updates” widget you won’t miss any newly added or updated plugin anymore. This will help you learn about and discover the useful plugins and themes available on the Marketplace.
Super users can now see at a glance the current state of the Piwik system, thanks to the new “System Check” and “System Summary” widgets.
API Changes
Piwik is the leading open analytics platform, highly customisable and extensible thanks to a flexible plugins architecture and a design based on APIs. In this new major Piwik 3 release, we significantly improve the foundation of our open platform and several of its core APIs.
The new Widgets and Reporting API makes it possible to add reports and widgets to any existing reporting page. In the past, reporting pages had to be created manually which was time consuming and it was hard to maintain a consistent look across different reporting pages. Now reporting pages are generated automatically by the Piwik platform.
The Plugin Settings API was changed to improve performance and to let plugin developers customize the Websites Manager. This is one step towards our goal to let users not only manage websites but also mobile apps, cars, coffee machines or any other thing.
To see a full list of changes in the Piwik 3 analytics platform, have a look at the developer changelog.
Developer docs
The Piwik Developer Zone is full of guides and API references to help developers understand, integrate and extend Piwik. As some APIs have changed in the Piwik 3 release it is now possible to select the Piwik version in the top right corner of the developer zone.
We are updating guides for Piwik 3 and added a Piwik 2 -> Piwik 3 Migration Guide for plugin developers. Many other guides were updated such as Menus, Custom Report and Widgets.
Release date
The first Piwik 3 beta release will be available in the next four weeks. Beta testers automatically receive the update if they are subscribed to the “Latest Beta” release channel. The final Piwik 3 release will be ready before the end of the year. If you want to give it a try, you can either use Piwik from Git and check out the “3.x-dev” branch, or download Piwik 3 from GitHub.
Closing thoughts
With faster & more beautiful reports, better APIs and more stability, Piwik 3 is a big step forward for all Piwik users. As our mission is to create, as a community, the leading international open source web analytics platform that gives every user full control of their data, we are very excited to introduce you to this upcoming release.
We now offer Custom Development services if you like to sponsor a new feature or bug fix, or if you have any custom requirements. And if you use Piwik Analytics to grow your business and need quality help, contact the Piwik analytics experts to get started.
Until our next Piwik 3 dev update, Happy analysis!
