

Piwik 1.8 includes more ways to graph reports

Source: The Piwik project

The developers of the open source web analytics engine Piwik have released versions 1.8 and 1.8.1 of their software. Version 1.8 brings several key improvements to the user interface and introduces Do Not Track (DNT) support. The 1.8 release is also rated as a critical update after a security review identified a "limited" XSS vulnerability, a cookie denial of service vulnerability and a local file inclusion vulnerability. The Piwik developers recommend updating to the latest version as soon as possible, with the latest version being 1.8.1, released a few days after 1.8 after a number of regressions were found.

Going forward, all versions of Piwik will honour DNT headers by default. This means that if a visitor has set their browser's Do Not Track option, Piwik will comply and the visitor will not be tracked by Piwik. Piwik's support for acknowledging DNT headers, and its enabling of the feature by default, will help a large number of Piwik using web site owners to more easily implement DNT compliance for their sites. The behaviour can, it should be noted, be turned off by the user in Piwik's Privacy menu. Piwik also now includes an option to disable all first party cookies; this is useful for webmasters having to comply with the European directive on web site cookies which recently went into effect in the UK.

The program's user interface has also seen a number of improvements. Users can now pull up historical graphs of any row in any report table within the application. They can also visually compare multiple rows against each other and create custom dashboards; this allows them to have the information that they need most to be available right from one page. The new Browser Marketshare report groups browser versions together and shows the total number of visits to a site by browser. Piwik also now gives a total breakdown of mobile versus desktop visits to sites. A detailed list featuring screenshot examples of all of the improvements in Piwik 1.8 and 1.8.1 can be found on the project's site.

Piwik is an open source, self-hosted alternative to Google Analytics. The software is available for download in source form and documentation on installation and operation is also available. Piwik is licensed under the GPLv3.

See also:

Piwik adds log file analysis capabilities, a report from The H.



(fab)