Piwik 1.10, the latest version of the open source web analytics package, has been released. This new version gives users the ability to annotate events and introduces a new page overlay interface that shows important analytics data on top of the web page that is being monitored. Piwik is an open source, self-hosted alternative to services such as Google Analytics.

The new Page Overlay presents users with a view of their web site with a sidebar that gives an overview of the general metrics for the site. It also shows popup bubbles that illustrate visitor transitions and which elements such as links and buttons visitors interact with the most. A live demonstration of this feature is available at demo.piwik.org; this shows the statistics for the Piwik Forums. Annotations allow administrators to attach text notes to their site statistics to mark certain events, such as changes to the web site, holiday periods or product launches. This helps reference spikes in hits or slow periods later. Notes can also be marked with a star to make them easier to find.



Piwik's Page Overlay mode shows what elements site visitors interact with

GeoIP integration, which was introduced in Piwik 1.9, has been further improved by the addition of an automated installer for GeoIP databases. This feature was supposed to ship with version 1.9 but took longer to implement than expected. Since Piwik itself does not come with such a database, users have to install them from third party provides such as MaxMind – which also provides a database free-of-charge that Piwik will now download and install automatically. Other new features in Piwik 1.10 include social network reports, the ability to exclude visitors from tracking by their user agent and improvements to the SEO widget that adds new statistics. Piwik's user interface has also been further polished.

The developers are currently working on version 2.0 of the application and have started a crowdfunding campaign to support this development. Source code for Piwik is available to download from the project's web site and is licensed under the GPLv3.

(fab)