Piwik Retrospective 2008

Piwik 2008 restrospective London Saturday, 5th July 2008

Timeline

June 15 th 2007 Piwik software design starts!

July 17th 2007 Piwik.org domain creation

January 4 th 2008 Piwik.org website ~ 10 visitors per day dev.piwik.org opens

March 28 th 2008 Piwik first public release 0.1.1

Best New Features

February 2008, by Julien Customisable dashboard

March 2008, by Maciej Automatic outlink + downloads tracking

April 2008, by Maciej & Matt i18n implementation: Piwik can be translated! (l ongest Trac ticket in Piwik’s history #62 )

June 2008, by Matt huge performance and memory improvements Piwik can now handle +1M visits per month

Piwik versions

545 commits

15 new versions

16,000 downloads!

Traffic overview The first months of Piwik have been very fun, as the web buzzed a lot about us! I built these graphs using the Piwik API to get the web analytics data

Delicious.com homepage (again!) Delicious.com homepage (for a few hours) Smashing magazine article

Stumbleupon.com buzz

linuxfr.org homepage

reddit.org homepage

Server crash, moving to new server

Readwriteweb.com article

ostatic.com article

~ 80 visits per day BUZZ! ~ 2500 visits per day ~ 900 visits per day

They buzzed! And generated a lot of traffic that helped increase awareness of Piwik

ostatic.com

linuxfr.org

webappers.com

reddit.com

readwriteweb.com

.NET Magazine, July edition

Overview of the community Building a developers community is one of our ultimate goal. Where are we today?

Developers TRAC

+100 users registered

272 tickets created

88 fixed

(40 duplicates or invalid)

144 still opened

Mailing list

Piwik-hackers

interesting questions & use cases

60 members

Plugins

Developers slowly start to write plugins

GeoIp Localization Plugin Better user geo-localization, reports visitors by cities #45

Translation Tool Plugin Makes life easy for translators, provides a GUI to write the translations #171

Simple integration of Piwik in other CMS Users have written simple plugins for their CMS to easily include the Piwik JS code for Drupal, Wordpress,

Dotclear, Dokuwiki, Mediawiki, Typo3

Video Tracking Provides video usage reports (video loaded, played, 10% completed, 90% completed, etc.). Shiny user interface.

Users community What do people think about Piwik?

Piwik has an international audience

+ long tail...

Thanks for building a great product. Even thought it is Beta I have installed it on a new shopping site that I am building. It is running side by side with Google Analytics. - Patrick

I must tell you we are REALLY EXCITED about the promise of Piwik. We currently use Google Analytics and are desperate to use something that we can control, like Piwik. - Todd

Found Piwik last week and I’ve been really excited about it. I’ve been testing it out on a few sites and am _really_ excited about the possibilities that an API offers. I’m not sure if I could help, but I’d love to help where I can. - Bett

I personally have a bit of experience working with Ominute, Hitbox, and Google Analytics, and the idea of an open source alternative to these tools sounds very exciting. Across our network of sites, we average about 60m pageviews / month and growing, and I was wondering if that level of load is within the scope of Piwik, given the proper hardware to support it. I’d love to find a way to help the Piwik project get to the point where it could handle millions of pageviews / month. - Jonathan

29 readers 527 readers

Team Updates

Julien unfortunately left after his huge work on Piwik (customizable dashboard). He is busy with his new life, but may come back in the future 

Thierry (Spain) stepped in to help with Marketing, is starting a business using Piwik.

Maciej (Poland) submitted several patches and new features that were included in the SVN. He is starting a business using Piwik as a foundation part.

Noah (US) is managing all the translators and is doing a great job!

Current Team

Matt, Project Leader

Maciej, Core Contributor

Johan, System Operations

Thierry, Marketing

Noah, Translations Manager

We’ve done well! What are the positive points of these first 6 months?

Good points

Feedback is very positive!

Bloggers blog about Piwik

Most people believe the potential is huge, and keep an eye on Piwik

Developers like and use the APIs

piwik.org is already #2 on “web analytics” on Google

Good points

It seems we are using the right tools, efficient dev architecture: Trac, svn, mailing lists, easy to push new releases via script Kudos Johan

The testing platform was very useful, and helped us find and fix important performance issues Kudos Thierry and Johan

Good points

Internationalization of Piwik has been a huge success

Recruiting Noah made a significant difference

Translators have worked hard

already 9 translations available

many more to come!

But we’ve learnt from some mistakes This why this retrospective is useful: looking back and determining what went wrong

Getting People to Contribute

We’ve received many love messages from people who wanted to help

But it was hard for them to get started for several reasons:

many talkers (“I’d love to help! What can I do?” “I don’t have time actually, sorry”)

... very few Do-ers!

we also managed badly this potential help from new people

What can we do better? We shall not repeat the same mistakes again 

Getting more help

Create a page “How to contribute to Piwik?” it would list all the ways one can help (design, development+links to tickets that can be implemented, marketing, documentation, usability, security, etc.)

Very simple example plugins + tutorials (also explain that people should contact us or add trac tickets if changes in the core are required)

Add more context and thoughts in the tickets Tickets in TRAC are often incomplete and miss context. People don’t have time to investigate themselves.

Recruit a Documentation Manager Piwik needs somebody to build a better documentation. Obvious missing documentation: list of features, requirements, how to install Piwik, how to update Piwik...

Make Piwik Better