Here at Surevine we pride ourselves on being open source advocates. Part of the value we deliver to our clients is in surveying the open source ecosystem and critically reviewing the projects we find, in order to deliver best of breed software solutions.
One feature our clients regularly require is application analytics, providing the ability to track and measure the usage of a system. Following a recent market survey in the analytics space, Surevine selected Piwik as our web analytics platform of choice.
Piwik is an open source analytics application that can be self-hosted, allowing the owners to retain control of their data (rather than passing it to companies like Google).
We’ve been using Piwik for quite a while for our own website analytics, and have nothing but good things to say. It offers all the functionality commonly required of an analytics tool, is easily extendible and has proven to be very stable.
Given this, we were very excited when we received some great news from the Piwik team: version 2 has now been released, boasting plenty of new features / benefits including:
- Theme support, meaning developers can quickly and easily customise the appearance of Piwik
- Improved default theme (Morpheus), that is much cleaner and more in-keeping with modern design trends
- New plugin marketplace, a convenient place to discover plugins to extend the platform
- 171 bug fixes
- Support for 53 languages
A full breakdown of the 2.0 release can be viewed at http://piwik.org/changelog/piwik-2-0/.
Accompanying the release is a new iOS application to match the new look and feel of the main application (and also matches iOS7’s flat UI). This can be used to access any Piwik installation on the go.
We’re very excited about being able to deliver these new features and improved stability to our customers, and will be keeping a keen eye on the future of the Piwik project.
If you are interested in using Piwik, then you can find out more on their website. Better still, as Piwik is an open source project, there are a variety of ways you can get involved in the project if you’d like to help improve it.