Planet Ergo

Paul Adams asked me to install Web Analytics for Kolab Systems, his preference being Piwik, which he had used before.

Now, when some request like that hits me, I'm usually like "Oh yeah? Web analytics is it? What is it you actually want? Number of hits?" just because I would like to go from the functional requirements as opposed to being the monkey to implement whatever and then having to maintain/modify/develop whatever because it isn't quite all what was expected.

However, in this case, and those kudos go to Piwik, I looked at it, I tried it once and then decided to put it in production -normally I deploy something to testing first, then have someone make up their mind and make absolutely sure it's good and ready.

However, in this case, the case of Piwik, the installation procedure was like next-next-finish, it got me what I needed right-away, and it runs exactly the way I expect it to run -that's unique compared to how I needed to run in circles for many, many other web-based applications.

Either way, long story short, if you need Web Analytics do take a look at Piwik. It's awesome, even though it's not as extensive in admin features such as delegating a per-profile per-user set-of-privileges (to view or admin such profile). You would most commonly deploy Piwik within one organisation or multiple organisations that trust one another to some or the other extent, specifically for a limited set of websites anyway (e.g. not the multi-multi user deployment that is Google Analytics), and there's very valid reasons to not want to use Google Analytics.