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• How to expose new API methods in the HTTP Reporting API – Introducing the Piwik Platform

  26 février 2015, 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 write UI tests for your plugin). This time you’ll learn how to extend our Reporting API. For this tutorial you will need to have basic knowledge of PHP.

  What is Piwik’s Reporting API ?

  It allows third party applications to access analytics data and manipulate miscellaneous data (such as users or websites) through HTTP requests.

  What is it good for ?

  The Reporting API is used by the Piwik UI to render reports, to manage users, and more. If you want to add a feature to the Piwik UI, you might have to expose a method in the API to access this data. As the API is called via HTTP it allows you to fetch or manipulate any Piwik related data from anywhere. In these exposed API methods you can do pretty much anything you want, for example :

  • Enhance existing reports with additional data
  • Filter existing reports based on custom rules
  • Access the database and generate custom reports
  • Persist and read any data
  • Request server information

  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.
  • Generate a plugin : ./console generate:plugin --name="MyApiPlugin". There should now be a folder plugins/MyApiPlugin.
  • And activate the created plugin : ./console plugin:activate "MyApiPlugin"

  Let’s start creating an API

  We start by using the Piwik Console to create a new API :

  ./console generate:api

  The command will ask you to enter the name of the plugin the created API should belong to. I will simply use the above chosen plugin name “MyApiPlugin”. There should now be a file plugins/MyApiPlugin/API.php which contains already an example to get you started easily :

  class API extends \Piwik\Plugin\API
  {
      public function getAnswerToLife($truth = true)
      {
          if ($truth) {
              return 42;
          }
   
          return 24;
      }
   
      public function getExampleReport($idSite, $period, $date, $wonderful = false)
      {
          $table = DataTable::makeFromSimpleArray(array(
              array('label' => 'My Label 1', 'nb_visits' => '1'),
              array('label' => 'My Label 2', 'nb_visits' => '5'),
          ));
   
          return $table;
      }
  }
  Télécharger

  Any public method in that file will be available via the Reporting API. For example the method getAnswerToLife can be called via this URL : index.php?module=API&method=MyApiPlugin.getAnswerToLife. The URL parameter method is a combination of your plugin name and the method name within this class.

  Passing parameters to your method

  Both example methods define some parameters. To pass any value to a parameter of your method simply specify them by name in the URL. For example ...&method=MyApiPlugin.getExampleReport&idSite=1&period=week&date=today&wonderful=1 to pass values to the parameters of the method getExampleReport.

  Returning a value

  In an API method you can return any boolean, number, string or array value. A resource or an object cannot be returned unless it implements the DataTableInterface such as DataTable (the primary data structure used to store analytics data in Piwik), DataTable\Map (stores a set of DataTables) and DataTable\Simple (a DataTable where every row has two columns : label and value).

  Did you know ? You can choose the response format of your API request by appending a parameter &format=JSON|XML|CSV|... to the URL. Check out the Reporting API Reference for more information.

  Best practices

  Check user permissions

  Do not forget to check whether a user actually has permissions to access data or to perform an action. If you’re not familiar with Piwik’s permissions and how to check them read our User Permission guide.

  Keep API methods small

  At Piwik we aim to write clean code. Therefore, we recommend to keep API methods small (separation of concerns). An API pretty much acts like a Controller :

  public function createLdapUser($idSite, $login, $password)
  {
      Piwik::checkUserHasAdminAccess($idSite);
      $this->checkLogin($login);
      $this->checkPassword($password);
      
      $myModel = new LdapModel();
      $success = $myModel->createUser($idSite, $login, $password);
      
      return $success;
  }
  Télécharger

  This is not only easy to read, it will also allow you to create simple tests for LdapModel (without having to bootstrap the whole Piwik layer) and you will be able to reuse it in other places if needed.

  Calling APIs of other plugins

  For example if you want to fetch an existing report from another plugin, say a list of all Page URLs, do not request this report by calling that method directly :

  \Piwik\Plugins\Actions\API::getInstance()->getPageUrls($idSite, $period, $date);

  . Instead, issue a new API request :

  $report = \Piwik\API\Request::processRequest('Actions.getPageUrls', array(
  
      'idSite' => $idSite,
  
      'period' => $period,
  
      'date'   => $date,
  
  ));

  This has several advantages :

  • It avoids a fatal error if the requested plugin is not available on a Piwik installation
  • Other plugins can extend the called API method via events (adding additional report data to a report, doing additional permission checks) but those events will be only triggered when requesting the report as suggested
  • If the method parameters change, your request will most likely still work

  Publishing your Plugin on the Marketplace

  In case you want to share your API 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 and best practices when publishing a plugin.

  Isn’t it easy to create a API ? We never even created a file ! If you have any feedback regarding our APIs or our guides in the Developer Zone feel free to send it to us.

• How Media Analytics for Piwik gives you the insights you need to measure how effective your video and audio marketing is – Part 1

  31 janvier 2017, par InnoCraft — Community

  Do you have video or audio content on your website or in your app ? If you answered this with yes, you should continue reading and learn everything about our Media Analytics premium feature.

  When you produce video or audio content, you are either spending money or time or often both money and time on your content in the hope of increasing conversions or sales. This means you have to know how your media is being used, when it is used, for how long and by whom. You can simply not afford not to know how this content affects your overall business goals as you are likely losing money and time by not making the most out of it. Would you be able to answer any of the above questions ? Do you know whether you can justify the cost and time for producing them, which videos work better than others and how they support your marketing strategy ? Luckily, getting all these insights is now so trivial it is almost a crime to not measure it.

  Getting Media Analytics and Installation

  Media Analytics can be purchased from the Piwik Marketplace where you find all sorts of free plugins as well as several premium features such as A/B Testing or Funnel. After the purchase you will receive a license key that you can enter in your Piwik to install and update the plugin with just one click.

  The feature will in most cases automatically start tracking your media content and you don’t even need to change the tracking code on your website. Currently supported players are for example YouTube, Vimeo, HTML 5, JW Player, VideoJS and many more players. You can also easily extend it by adding a custom media player or simply by letting us know which player you use and we will add support for it for you.

  By activating this feature, you get more than 15 new media reports, even more exportable widgets, new segments, APIs, and more. We will cover some of those features in this blog post and in part 2. For a full list of features check out the Media Analytics page on the Piwik Marketplace.

  Media Overview

  As the name says, it gives you an overview over your media usage and how it performs over time. You can choose any media metrics in the big evolution graph and the sparklines below give you an overview over all important metrics in a glance.

  

  It lets you for example see how often media was shown to your users, how often users start playing your media, for how long they watched it, how often they finished it, and more. If you see some spikes there, you should definitely have a deeper look at the other reports. When you hover a metric, it will show you a tooltip explaining how the data for this is collected and what it means.

  Real-Time Media

  On the Real-Time page you can see how your content is being used by your visitors right now, for example within the last 30 minutes, last 60 minutes and last 24 hours.

  It shows you how many plays you had in the last minutes, for how long they played it, and it shows you currently most popular media titles. This is great to discover which media content performs best right now and lets you make decisions based on user behaviour that is happening right now.

  

  Below you can see our Audience Real-Time Map that shows you from where in the world your media is being played. A bigger circle indicates that a media play happened more recently and of course you can zoom in down to countries and regions.

  

  All the reports update every few seconds so you can always have a look at it and see in just a second how your content is doing and how certain marketing campaigns affect it. All these real-time reports can be also added as widgets to any of your Piwik Dashboards and they can be exported for example as an iframe.

  Video, Audio and Media Player reports

  Those reports come with so many features, we need a separate blog post and cover this in part 2.

  Events

  Media Analytics will automatically track events so you can see how often users pressed for example play or pause, how often they resumed a video and how often they finished a video. This helps you better understand how your media is being used.

  

  For example in the past we noticed a couple of videos with lots of pause and resume events. We then had a look at the Audience Log – which we will cover next – to better understand why visitors paused the videos so often. We then realized they did this especially for videos that were served from a specific server and because the videos were loading so slow, users often pressed pause to let the media buffer, then played the media for a few seconds and then paused it again as they had to wait for the video to load. Moving those videos to another, faster server showed us immediate results in the number of pauses going down and on average visitors watched the videos for much longer.

  Audience Log

  At InnoCraft, we understand that not only aggregated metrics matter but also that you often need the ability to dig into your data and “debug” certain behaviours to understand the cause for some unusual high or low metrics. For example you may find out that many of your users often pause a video, then you wonder how each individual user behaved so you can better understand the why.

  

  The audience log shows you a detailed log of every visitor. You can chronologically see every action a visitor has performed during their whole visit. If you click on the visitor profile link, you can even see all visits of a specific visitor, and all actions they have ever performed on your website.

  This lets you ultimately debug and understand your visitors and see exactly which actions they performed before playing your media, which media they played, how they played your media, and how they behaved after playing your media.

  The visitor log of course also shows important information about each visitor like where they came from (referrer), their location, software, device and much more information.

  Audience Map

  The Audience Map is similar to the Real-Time Map but it shows you the locations of your visitors based on a selected date range and not in real time. The darker the blue, the more visitors from that country, region or city have interacted with your media.

  

  Coming in part 2

  In the next part we will cover which video, audio and media player reports Media Analytics provides, how segmenting gives you insights into different personas, and how nicely it integrates into Piwik.

  How to get Media Analytics and related features

  You can get Media Analytics on the Piwik Marketplace. If you want to learn more about this feature, you might be also interested in the Media Analytics User Guide and the Media Analytics FAQ.

• How to create a scheduled task – Introducing the Piwik Platform

  28 août 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 create a custom theme in Piwik). This time you’ll learn how to execute scheduled tasks in the background, for instance sending a daily email. For this tutorial you will need to have basic knowledge of PHP.

  What can you do with scheduled tasks ?

  Scheduled tasks let you execute tasks regularly (hourly, weekly, …). For instance you can :

  • create and send custom reports or summaries
  • sync users and websites with other systems
  • clear any caches
  • import third-party data into Piwik
  • monitor your Piwik instance
  • execute any other task you can think of

  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="MyTasksPlugin". There should now be a folder plugins/MyTasksPlugin.
  • And activate the created plugin under Settings => Plugins.

  Let’s start creating a scheduled task

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

  ./console generate:scheduledtask

  The command will ask you to enter the name of the plugin the task should belong to. I will simply use the above generated plugin name “MyTasksPlugin”. There should now be a file plugins/MyTasksPlugin/Tasks.php which contains some examples to get you started easily :

  class Tasks extends \Piwik\Plugin\Tasks
  
  {
  
      public function schedule()
  
      {
  
          $this->hourly('myTask');  // method will be executed once every hour
  
          $this->daily('myTask');   // method will be executed once every day
  
          $this->weekly('myTask');  // method will be executed once every week
  
          $this->monthly('myTask'); // method will be executed once every month
  
  
  
          // pass a parameter to the task
  
          $this->weekly('myTaskWithParam', 'anystring');
  
  
  
          // specify a different priority
  
          $this->monthly('myTask', null, self::LOWEST_PRIORITY);
  
          $this->monthly('myTaskWithParam', 'anystring', self::HIGH_PRIORITY);
  
      }
  
  
  
      public function myTask()
  
      {
  
          // do something
  
      }
  
  
  
      public function myTaskWithParam($param)
  
      {
  
          // do something
  
      }
  
  }

  A simple example

  As you can see in the generated template you can execute tasks hourly, daily, weekly and monthly by registering a method which represents the actual task :

  public function schedule()
  
  {
  
      // register method remindMeToLogIn to be executed once every day
  
      $this->daily('remindMeToLogIn');  
  
  }
  
  
  
  public function remindMeToLogIn()
  
  {
  
      $mail = new \Piwik\Mail();
  
      $mail->addTo('me@example.com');
  
      $mail->setSubject('Check stats');
  
      $mail->setBodyText('Log into your Piwik instance and check your stats!');
  
      $mail->send();
  
  }

  This example sends you an email once a day to remind you to log into your Piwik daily. The Piwik platform makes sure to execute the method remindMeToLogIn exactly once every day.

  How to pass a parameter to a task

  Sometimes you want to pass a parameter to a task method. This is useful if you want to register for instance one task for each user or for each website. You can achieve this by specifying a second parameter when registering the method to execute.

  public function schedule()
  
  {
  
      foreach (\Piwik\Site::getSites() as $site) {
  
          // create one task for each site and pass the URL of each site to the task
  
          $this->hourly('pingSite', $site['main_url']); 
  
      }
  
  }
  
  
  
  public function pingSite($siteMainUrl)
  
  {
  
      file_get_contents($siteMainUrl);
  
  }

  How to test scheduled tasks

  After you have created your task you are surely wondering how to test it. First, you should write a unit or integration test which we will cover in one of our future blog posts. Just one hint : You can use the command ./console generate:test to create a test. To manually execute all scheduled tasks you can execute the API method CoreAdminHome.runScheduledTasks by opening the following URL in your browser :

  http://piwik.example.com/index.php?module=API&method=CoreAdminHome.runScheduledTasks&token_auth=YOUR_API_TOKEN

  Don’t forget to replace the domain and the token_auth URL parameter.

  There is one problem with executing the scheduled tasks : The platform makes sure they will be executed only once an hour, a day, etc. This means you can’t simply reload the URL and test the method again and again as you would have to wait for the next hour or day. The proper solution is to set the constant DEBUG_FORCE_SCHEDULED_TASKS to true within the file Core/TaskScheduler.php. Don’t forget to set it back to false again once you have finished testing it.

  Starting from Piwik 2.6.0 you can alternatively execute the following command :

  ./console core:run-scheduled-tasks --force --token-auth=YOUR_TOKEN_AUTH

  The option “–force” will make sure to execute even tasks that are not due to run at this time. So you won’t have to modify any files.

  Which tasks are registered and when is the next execution time of my task ?

  The TasksTimetable plugin from the Marketplace can answer this question for you. Simply install and activate the plugin with one click by going to Settings => Marketplace => Get new functionality. It’ll add a new admin menu item under Settings named Scheduled Tasks.

  Publishing your Plugin on the Marketplace

  In case you want to share your task(s) 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 scheduled tasks ? We never even created a file ! Of course, based on our API design principle “The complexity of our API should never exceed the complexity of your use case.” you can accomplish more if you want. For instance, you can define priorities, you can directly register methods from different objects and classes, you can specify at which time of a day a task should run and more.

  Would you like to know more about tasks ? Go to our Tasks class reference in the Piwik Developer Zone.

  If you have any feedback regarding our APIs or our guides in the Developer Zone feel free to send it to us.