At the end of this year's Plone conference in Bristol, we took part in the 2-day Plone video sprint. We have worked along with Giorgos Logiotatidis and the result was the creation of collective.piwik.*, a set of Plone products that provide analytics content into Plone sites using Piwik.
Analytics support is a necessity for every modern web site. We use the great open source system Piwik and need a set of tools that can be integrated in Plone sites to display data such as number of views of each page, number of visitors currently using the site, number of times a video has been played, etc.
Piwik provides an API that exposes data on several formats, including XML and JSON. We decided to fetch the data from a Piwik server, and display it on viewlets or portlets, that can be put anywhere. We didn't want to create one package with all the viewlets, because this would be unnecessary for most Plone sites, but instead create separate packages for each of the viewlets. Thus we created:
- collective.piwik.flowplayer, which provides a video play counter for Plone sites that use collective.flowplayer
- collective.piwik.now, which provides an "Online users" portlet, displaying the number of visitors that have been active during the last xx minutes, where xx is configurable
- collective.piwik.pageviews, which displays pageviews and unique visits for any page
the online portlet
the pages viewlet, assigned by default on IBelowContent slot
The above products are still on alpha releases and more work is planned during the coming month. Extra effort will be given to assure there are no security and privacy issues. At the moment the user's browser queries the Piwik server directly, so the Piwik server has to be configured to provide the analytics data to anybody, which is a not wanted dead in most cases. The architecture will soon be changed so that the piwik API is invoked by the Zope server in order not to expose any data that shouldn't be public.
The products will soon be integrated on www.engagemedia.org. Thanks to anyone who tests and reports bugs!