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• How to make your plugin configurable – Introducing the Piwik Platform

  18 septembre 2014, par Thomas Steur — Development

  This is the next post of our blog series where we introduce the capabilities of the Piwik platform (our previous post was How to add new pages and menu items to Piwik). This time you will learn how to define settings for your plugin. For this tutorial you will need to have basic knowledge of PHP.

  What can I do with settings ?

  The Settings API offers you a simple way to make your plugin configurable within the Admin interface of Piwik without having to deal with HTML, JavaScript, CSS or CSRF tokens. There are many things you can do with settings, for instance let users configure :

  • connection infos to a third party system such as a WordPress installation.
  • select a metric to be displayed in your widget
  • select a refresh interval for your widget
  • which menu items, reports or widgets should be displayed
  • and much more

  Getting started

  In this series of posts, we assume that you have already set up your development environment. If not, visit the Piwik Developer Zone where you’ll find the tutorial Setting up Piwik.

  To summarize the things you have to do to get setup :

  • Install Piwik (for instance via git).
  • Activate the developer mode : ./console development:enable --full.
  • Generate a plugin : ./console generate:plugin --name="MySettingsPlugin". There should now be a folder plugins/MySettingsPlugin.
  • And activate the created plugin under Settings => Plugins.

  Let’s start creating settings

  We start by using the Piwik Console to create a settings template :

  ./console generate:settings

  The command will ask you to enter the name of the plugin the settings should belong to. I will simply use the above chosen plugin name “MySettingsPlugin”. There should now be a file plugins/MySettingsPlugin/Settings.php which contains already some examples to get you started easily. To see the settings in action go to Settings => Plugin settings in your Piwik installation.

  

  Adding one or more settings

  Settings are added in the init() method of the settings class by calling the method addSetting() and passing an instance of a UserSetting or SystemSetting object. How to create a setting is explained in the next chapter.

  Customising a setting

  To create a setting you have to define a name along some options. For instance which input field should be displayed, what type of value you expect, a validator and more. Depending on the input field we might automatically validate the values for you. For example if you define available values for a select field then we make sure to validate and store only a valid value which provides good security out of the box.

  For a list of possible properties have a look at the SystemSetting and UserSetting API reference.

  class Settings extends \Piwik\Plugin\Settings
  
  {
  
      public $refreshInterval;
  
  
  
      protected function init()
  
      {
  
          $this->setIntroduction('Here you can specify the settings for this plugin.');
  
  
  
          $this->createRefreshIntervalSetting();
  
      }
  
  
  
      private function createRefreshIntervalSetting()
  
      {
  
          $this->refreshInterval = new UserSetting('refreshInterval', 'Refresh Interval');
  
          $this->refreshInterval->type = static::TYPE_INT;
  
          $this->refreshInterval->uiControlType = static::CONTROL_TEXT;
  
          $this->refreshInterval->uiControlAttributes = array('size' => 3);
  
          $this->refreshInterval->description = 'How often the value should be updated';
  
          $this->refreshInterval->inlineHelp = 'Enter a number which is >= 15';
  
          $this->refreshInterval->defaultValue = '30';
  
          $this->refreshInterval->validate = function ($value, $setting) {
  
              if ($value < 15) {
  
                  throw new \Exception('Value is invalid');
  
              }
  
          };
  
  
  
          $this->addSetting($this->refreshInterval);
  
      }
  
  }

  In this example you can see some of those properties. Here we create a setting named “refreshInterval” with the display name “Refresh Interval”. We want the setting value to be an integer and the user should enter this value in a text input field having the size 3. There is a description, an inline help and a default value of 30. The validate function makes sure to accept only integers that are at least 15, otherwise an error in the UI will be shown.

  

  You do not always have to specify a PHP type and a uiControlType. For instance if you specify a PHP type boolean we automatically display a checkbox by default. Similarly if you specify to display a checkbox we assume that you want a boolean value.

  Accessing settings values

  You can access the value of a setting in a widget, in a controller, in a report or anywhere you want. To access the value create an instance of your settings class and get the value like this :

  $settings = new Settings();
  
  $interval = $settings->refreshInterval->getValue()

  Type of settings

  The Piwik platform differentiates between UserSetting and SystemSetting. User settings can be configured by any logged in user and each user can configure the setting independently. The Piwik platform makes sure that settings are stored per user and that a user cannot see another users configuration.

  A system setting applies to all of your users. It can be configured only by a user who has super user access. By default, the value can be read only by a super user as well but often you want to have it readable by anyone or at least by logged in users. If you set a setting readable the value will still be only displayed to super users but you will always be able to access the value in the background.

  Imagine you are building a widget that fetches data from a third party system where you need to configure an API URL and token. While no regular user should see the value of both settings, the value should still be readable by any logged in user. Otherwise when logged in users cannot read the setting value then the data cannot be fetched in the background when this user wants to see the content of the widget. Solve this by making the setting readable by the current user :

  $setting->readableByCurrentUser = !Piwik::isUserIsAnonymous();

  Publishing your Plugin on the Marketplace

  In case you want to share your settings or your plugin with other Piwik users you can do this by pushing your plugin to a public GitHub repository and creating a tag. Easy as that. Read more about how to distribute a plugin.

  Advanced features

  Isn’t it easy to create settings for plugins ? We never even created a file ! The Settings API already offers many possibilities but it might not yet be as flexible as your use case requires. So let us know in case you are missing something and we hope to add this feature at some point in the future.
  
  If you have any feedback regarding our APIs or our guides in the Developer Zone feel free to send it to us.

• Why Matomo is a serious alternative to Google Analytics 360

  12 décembre 2018, par Jake Thornton — Marketing
  There’s no doubt about it, the free version of Google Analytics offers great value when it comes to making data-driven decisions for your business. But as your business starts to grow, so does the need for a more powerful web analytics tool.

  Why would I need to use a different web analytics tool ? It’s because Google Analytics (free version) is very limited when it comes to meeting the needs of a fast growing business whose website plays a pivotal role in converting its customers.

  This is where the Google Analytics 360 suite comes in, which is designed to meet the needs of businesses looking to get more accurate and insightful metrics.

  So what’s holding a growing business back from using Google Analytics 360 ?

  While GA360 sounds like a great option when upgrading your web analytics platform, we have found there are three core reasons holding businesses back from taking the leap :

  • Businesses can’t bear to swallow the US$150,000+ price tag (per year !) that comes with upgrading
  • Businesses can’t rely on GA360 to give them all the insights they need
  • Businesses want more control and ownership of their data

  Thankfully there are (only a few) alternatives and as the leading open-source alternative to Google Analytics, we hope to share insights on why Matomo Analytics can be the perfect solution for anyone at this crossroads in their web analytics journey.

  First, what does Google Analytics 360 offer that Google Analytics (free) doesn’t ?

  There’s no doubt about it, the GA360 suite is designed for larger sized businesses with demanding data limits, big budgets to use across the Google Marketing Platform (Google Adwords, DoubleClick etc.) and to get more advanced reporting visualisations and options.
  

  Data Sampling

  Data sampling is the elephant in the room when it comes to comparing GA360 with the freemium version. This is an entire article in its own right but at a basic level, Google Analytics samples your data (makes assumptions based on patterns) once the number of traffic visiting your website reaches a certain limit.

  Google Analytics provides the following information :

  Ad-hoc queries of your data are subject to the following general thresholds for sampling :

  Analytics Standard : 500k sessions at the property level for the date range you are using

  Analytics 360 : 100M sessions at the view level for the date range you are using

  In short, sampled data means inaccurate data. This is why as businesses grow, GA360 becomes a more attractive prospect because there’s no point making data-driven business decisions based on inaccurate data. This is a key weapon Google uses when selling to large businesses, however, this may not seem as concerning if you’re a small business within the sampled data range. For small businesses though, make sure you know the full extent of how this can affect your metrics, for example, your ecommerce data could be sampled, hence your GA reporting not matching your CRM/Ecommerce store data.

  Benefit of using Matomo : There is no data sampling anywhere in Matomo Analytics, that’s why we say 100% Accurate Data reporting across all plans.

  

  Integration with the Google Marketing Platform

  Yes ok, we’ll admit it, GA does a great job at integrating seamlessly with its own products like Google Ads, Google Optimize etc. with a touch of Salesforce integration ; while GA360 takes this to another level compared to it’s freemium version (integration with Google Search 360, Google Display & Video 360 etc.)

  But… what about non-Google advertising platforms ? Well with Google being a dominant leader as a search engine, web browser, email provider, social media channel ; sometimes Google needs to keep its best interests at heart.

  Google is an online advertising giant and a bonus of Google Search 360 is that you can integrate your Bing Ads, Baidu and Yahoo Japan Search campaigns but that’s about it when it comes to integrations from its direct competitors. 

  Benefit of using Matomo : No biased treatment. You can integrate your Google, Yahoo and Bing search consoles for accurate search engine reporting, and in early 2019, Matomo will be releasing a Google Ads, Bing Ads and Facebook Ads Manager integration feature.

  Roll-Up Reporting
  

  Roll-up reporting lets you combine multiple accounts and properties into one view. This is a great benefit when upgrading from GA freemium to GA360. For example, if you’re a digital agency with multiple clients or you manage multiple websites under the one account, the roll-up reporting feature is wonderful when you need to combine data and reporting, instantly.

  Benefit of using Matomo : Matomo’s got this covered ! Roll-up reporting is available in the Matomo Business package (starting at $29 per month) for cloud hosting or you can purchase as a Premium Feature for On-Premise starting at $99 per year.

  Staying in full control of your data

  Who would have thought that one of biggest reasons people choose Matomo isn’t because of anything that leads to a higher ROI, but for the fact that users want more control of their data.
  

  Matomo’s philosophy around data ownership is simple, you own your data, no one else. If you choose to host Matomo Analytics On-Premise then you are in complete control because your data is stored on your own servers where no one can gain access to it in whichever country you choose.

  So what about when you cloud host Matomo ? For users who don’t have the technical knowledge to host Matomo On-Premise, you can still have 100% data ownership and fully respect your user’s privacy when choosing to host Matomo Analytics through our cloud service.

  The difference between cloud hosting Matomo Analytics vs Google Analytics is that when you choose Matomo, we acknowledge you own the data and we have no right to access it. This means we can’t on-sell it to third-parties, we can’t claim ownership of it, you can export your data at anytime (how awesome is that !) and you can migrate between cloud hosting and hosting on-premise for ultimate flexibility whenever you want.

  Matomo also prides itself in allowing its users to be GDPR compliant with ease with a powerful GDPR Manager.

  Businesses can’t rely on Google Analytics 360 to give them all the insights they need

  Unlike Google Analytics 360, Matomo blends its Premium Web Analytics platform with Conversion Optimization features to allow its users to fully evaluate the user-experience on your website.

  Matomo is designed to be a complete analytics platform, meaning you have everything you need all in the one place which gives you greater insights and better business outcomes.

  
  These features include :

  Premium Web Analytics – You can still (accurately) measure all the basic metrics you love and are familiar with in Google Analytics like Location, Referrer traffic, Multi Attribution, Campaign Tracking and Ecommerce etc.

  Conversion Optimization – Eliminate the need for multiple analytics tools to get what Google Analytics doesn’t offer. These features include Heatmaps, Session Recordings, Form Analytics and more – giving you the best chance possible to convert more traffic by evaluating the user-experience.

  By having one tool for all your features you can integrate metrics, have one single view for all your data and it’s easy to use.

  Enhanced SEO – Get more insights into the performance of your search campaigns with unbiased search engine reporting, keyword ranking positions, integration with multiple search consoles and crawling stats. Google Analytics offers limited features to help with your SEO campaigns and only integrates with Google products.

  Visitor Profiles – Get a detailed life-time evaluation of every user who visits your website.

  Tag Manager – A powerful open-source Tag Manager tool to embed your third-party marketing tags. By being open-source and with our commitment to giving you 100% data ownership, you can always ensure you are in full control.

  Full Matomo vs Google Analytics 360 Comparison Table

  Just putting it out there ...

  Google leads the market with its freemium tool which offers great insights for businesses (fyi – Matomo has a forever free analytics tool too !), but when it comes to upgrading to get accurate reporting (kind of a big deal), owning your own data (a huge deal !) and having a complete range of features to excel ROI for your business, Matomo Analytics is often a preferred option to the Google Analytics 360 suite.

  Matomo is designed to be easy to use, is fully flexible and gives users full peace of mind by respecting user privacy. Want to learn more about the benefits of Matomo ?

• The 11th Hour RoQ Variation

  12 avril 2012, par Multimedia Mike — Game Hacking, dreamroq, Reverse Engineering, roq, Vector Quantization

  I have been looking at the RoQ file format almost as long as I have been doing practical multimedia hacking. However, I have never figured out how the RoQ format works on The 11th Hour, which was the game for which the RoQ format was initially developed. When I procured the game years ago, I remember finding what appeared to be RoQ files and shoving them through the open source decoders but not getting the right images out.

  I decided to dust off that old copy of The 11th Hour and have another go at it.

  
  
  

  Baseline
  The game consists of 4 CD-ROMs. Each disc has a media/ directory that has a series of files bearing the extension .gjd, likely the initials of one Graeme J. Devine. These are resource files which are merely headerless concatenations of other files. Thus, at first glance, one file might appear to be a single RoQ file. So that’s the source of some of the difficulty : Sending an apparent RoQ .gjd file through a RoQ player will often cause the program to complain when it encounters the header of another RoQ file.

  I have uploaded some samples to the usual place.

  However, even the frames that a player can decode (before encountering a file boundary within the resource file) look wrong.

  Investigating Codebooks Using dreamroq
  I wrote dreamroq last year– an independent RoQ playback library targeted towards embedded systems. I aimed it at a gjd file and quickly hit a codebook error.

  RoQ is a vector quantizer video codec that maintains a codebook of 256 2×2 pixel vectors. In the Quake III and later RoQ files, these are transported using a YUV 4:2:0 colorspace– 4 Y samples, a U sample, and a V sample to represent 4 pixels. This totals 6 bytes per vector. A RoQ codebook chunk contains a field that indicates the number of 2×2 vectors as well as the number of 4×4 vectors. The latter vectors are each comprised of 4 2×2 vectors.

  Thus, the total size of a codebook chunk ought to be (# of 2×2 vectors) * 6 + (# of 4×4 vectors) * 4.

  However, this is not the case with The 11th Hour RoQ files.

  Longer Codebooks And Mystery Colorspace
  Juggling the numbers for a few of the codebook chunks, I empirically determined that the 2×2 vectors are represented by 10 bytes instead of 6. Now I need to determine what exactly these 10 bytes represent.

  I should note that I suspect that everything else about these files lines up with successive generations of the format. For example if a file has 640×320 resolution, that amounts to 40×20 macroblocks. dreamroq iterates through 40×20 8×8 blocks and precisely exhausts the VQ bitstream. So that all looks valid. I’m just puzzled on the codebook format.

  Here is an example codebook dump :
  

  ID 0x1002, len = 0x0000014C, args = 0x1C0D
    0 : 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 80 80
    1 : 08 07 00 00 1F 5B 00 00 7E 81
    2 : 00 00 15 0F 00 00 40 3B 7F 84
    3 : 00 00 00 00 3A 5F 18 13 7E 84
    4 : 00 00 00 00 3B 63 1B 17 7E 85
    5 : 18 13 00 00 3C 63 00 00 7E 88
    6 : 00 00 00 00 00 00 59 3B 7F 81
    7 : 00 00 56 23 00 00 61 2B 80 80
    8 : 00 00 2F 13 00 00 79 63 81 83
    9 : 00 00 00 00 5E 3F AC 9B 7E 81
    10 : 1B 17 00 00 B6 EF 77 AB 7E 85
    11 : 2E 43 00 00 C1 F7 75 AF 7D 88
    12 : 6A AB 28 5F B6 B3 8C B3 80 8A
    13 : 86 BF 0A 03 D5 FF 3A 5F 7C 8C
    14 : 00 00 9E 6B AB 97 F5 EF 7F 80
    15 : 86 73 C8 CB B6 B7 B7 B7 85 8B
    16 : 31 17 84 6B E7 EF FF FF 7E 81
    17 : 79 AF 3B 5F FC FF E2 FF 7D 87
    18 : DC FF AE EF B3 B3 B8 B3 85 8B
    19 : EF FF F5 FF BA B7 B6 B7 88 8B
    20 : F8 FF F7 FF B3 B7 B7 B7 88 8B
    21 : FB FF FB FF B8 B3 B4 B3 85 88
    22 : F7 FF F7 FF B7 B7 B9 B7 87 8B
    23 : FD FF FE FF B9 B7 BB B7 85 8A
    24 : E4 FF B7 EF FF FF FF FF 7F 83
    25 : FF FF AC EB FF FF FC FF 7F 83
    26 : CC C7 F7 FF FF FF FF FF 7F 81
    27 : FF FF FE FF FF FF FF FF 80 80
  

  Note that 0x14C (the chunk size) = 332, 0x1C and 0x0D (the chunk arguments — count of 2×2 and 4×4 vectors, respectively) are 28 and 13. 28 * 10 + 13 * 4 = 332, so the numbers check out.

  Do you see any patterns in the codebook ? Here are some things I tried :

  • Treating the last 2 bytes as U & V and treating the first 4 as the 4 Y samples :
    
    
    
  • Treating the last 2 bytes as U & V and treating the first 8 as 4 16-bit little-endian Y samples :
    
    
    
  • Disregarding the final 2 bytes and treating the first 8 bytes as 4 RGB565 pixels (both little- and big-endian, respectively, shown here) :
    
    
    
  • Based on the type of data I’m seeing in these movies (which appears to be intended as overlays), I figured that some of these bits might indicate transparency ; here is 15-bit big-endian RGB which disregards the top bit of each pixel :
    
    
    

  These images are taken from the uploaded sample bdpuz.gjd, apparently a component of the puzzle represented in this screenshot.

  Unseen Types
  It has long been rumored that early RoQ files could contain JPEG images. I finally found one such specimen. One of the files bundled early in the uploaded fhpuz.gjd sample contains a JPEG frame. It’s a standard JFIF file and can easily be decoded after separating the bytes from the resource using ‘dd’. JPEGs serve as intraframes in the coding scheme, with successive RoQ frames moving objects on top.

  However, a new chunk type showed up as well, one identified by 0×1030. I have never encountered this type. Where could I possibly find data about this ? Fortunately, iD Games recently posted all of their open sourced games at Github. Reading through the code for their official RoQ decoder, I see that this is called a RoQ_PACKET. The name and the code behind it are both supremely unhelpful. The code is basically a no-op. The payloads of the various RoQ_PACKETs from one sample are observed to be either 8784, 14752, or 14760 bytes in length. It’s very likely that this serves the same purpose as the JPEG intraframes.

  Other Tidbits
  I read through the readme.txt on the first game disc and found this nugget :

          g)      Animations displayed normally or in SPOOKY MODE
                  SPOOKY MODE is blue-tinted grayscale with color cursors, puzzle
  
                  and game pieces.  It is the preferred display setting of the
  
                  developers at Trilobyte.  Just for fun, try out the SPOOKY
  
                  MODE.
  

  The MobyGames screenshot page has a number of screenshots labeled as being captured in spooky mode. Color tricks ?

  Meanwhile, another twist arose as I kept tweaking dreamroq to deal with more RoQ weirdness : After modifying my dreamroq code to handle these 10-byte vectors, it eventually chokes on another codebook. These codebooks happen to have 6-byte vectors again ! Fortunately, I was already working on a scheme to automatically detect which codebook is in play (plugging the numbers into a formula and seeing which vector size checks out).