Just noticed that I have a Piwik installation to track one of my niche sites, www.aliveworksheet.com.
It is showing that Piwik 1.7.1 is here, go to upgrade.
OK, even I can not find the current version, I still go to Piwik official site to download the latest one.
The upgrade procedure is simple. Download, Unzip, Copy/Overwrite, Upgrade page.
Yes, when the upgrade page shows, I know the existing one is v1.5.1.
Let me record the major changes or updates from 1.5.1 to 1.7.1.


On 1.6
Ecommerce Analytics improved:
New: track “price” on Ecommerce product pages
New: track up to 5 categories for each product page or category page!
Segmentation improved:
new segment visitConvertedGoalId to select visits that converted a specific Goal
new segments pageUrl and pageTitle to select all visits that visited a given Page URL or Page name
new segments customVariablePageName1, customVariablePageValue1, etc. to select all visits that had a specific Custom Variable with scope ‘page’ set. Until 1.6, Piwik would only segment for Custom Variables with scope ‘visit’.
Custom Variables improved:
string limit for Custom Variable name or value is now 200 characters instead of 100
when a Custom Variable name is set, but the value is empty, Piwik will now aggregate and report these as “Value not defined”
Dashboard: widgets can now be minimized and maximized for easier analysis
New plugin ImageGraph: generates static PNG graphs for any Piwik report. The graphs are used in the Piwik Mobile app. Kuddos to Arnfried Weber for this amazing contribution!
Security: we would like to thank the following people for their responsible disclosure: Alexandru Pitis, Alexander Schmid, Secure Business Austria, Krzysztof Kotowicz, David Vieira-Kurz, Szymon Gruszecki, Mateusz Goik, Mauro Gentile, Corto Gueguen.
Thank you to all these people for disclosing security issues to the Piwik team, ensuring a healthy and safe experience for the whole community!
Many bug fixes and improvements, see the ticket list below for more details
On 1.7
New Web Analytics reports!
New Loyalty report “Number of visitors who visited the website 1 time, 2 times, etc.”
New Recency report “Last visit was 0 day ago, 1 day ago, 2 days ago, etc.”
For each Goal and for your Ecommerce analytics, two new reports: “Visits until conversion”, “Days until conversion”
Scheduled reports (PDF/HTML) & Image graph improvements
“All Websites” summary can now be included in the scheduled reports.
You can now in 3 clicks receive a daily/weekly summary of ALL your websites analytics in your email box. Enjoy!
Email Reports now include Graphs by default for key metrics.
For example you will automatically see a graph for all reports that plot metrics such as the “Visits overview” report or “Goal overview” report.
Possibility to include a graph before each table report in PDF/HTML reports (disabled by default)
New horizontal bar graphs that look very pretty and allow for better data visualization. These graphs are the default graphs used in Scheduled reports.
Graphs now support Unicode characters (chinese, arabic, hebrew, etc.) after you upload the unicode font.
Major Usability Improvements
On most graphs, you can now select the metric to plot. For example you can now plot Pageviews, Revenue or Conversion rate over the last 30 days.
You can even plot multiple metrics at once, for example you can compare Conversion rate and Revenue for all goals, or for a specific goal.
Dashboard: you can now change the Dashboard Layout to choose 2 columns, 4 columns, or 3 columns with the first one taking half of the width, etc.
There are many layout options available for everyone to have the optimal analytics experience.
Dashboard: you can now “reset” the dashboard layout to the default selection of widgets.
In Visitors > Overview, Piwik used to report “Actions” which include all of Page views, Downloads and Clicks on external links.
Starting in Piwik 1.7 you will now see the detail, ie. 3 different stats and sparklines for Page views, Downloads and Outlinks separately.
Performance improvements when tracking hundreds or thousands of websites in Piwik
New archive.php script, replacing the previous archive.sh, much more efficient and optimized
“All websites dashboard” used to fail to load when you track dozens or hundreds of websites. Now it should take a few seconds/less than a minute to load.
Piwik 1.7 also marks an important milestone in Piwik history: the highest number of developers contributing significant new features.
The Piwik team is growing and you can participate!
Security
New option force_ssl to force Piwik to be used over SSL https://
We would like to thank the following security researchers for their responsible disclosure of XSS & click-jacking issues: Piotr Duszynski, Sergey Markov, Mauro Gentile.
Thank you for disclosing security issues to the Piwik team, ensuring a healthy and safe experience for the whole community!
New documentation: How to setup a secure and safe Piwik server and database
Many bug fixes and improvements, see the ticket list below for more details
On 1.7.1
he archive.php script now requires a new argument –url=http://your-website.com/path/to/piwik/
The URL auto-detection was not working on all systems so we had to add this requirement. The Auto archiving script documentation has been updated.
If you upgraded to Piwik 1.7 and are already using the new archive.php, please update your cron setup to add this parameter or the auto archiving will not run.
In all Piwik reports, you can now select the number of rows to display in the table. Piwik used to display 10 rows for most reports, but you can now change to 10, 25, 50, 250 or 500 rows at once. It even works in the Visitor Log!
If you change the number of rows to display in any of your Dashboard’s widget, the setting will be saved and restored the next time you access your dashboard.

David Yin

David is a blogger, geek, and web developer — founder of FreeInOutBoard.com. If you like his post, you can say thank you here

6 Replies to “Piwik Web Analytics upgrade to 1.7.1

  1. I like your blog but it is not compatible to chrome so i think you should take care of it.Anyway good report.Great to know about such reporting features.But i think report is not enough one should do proper analysis of that report and take proper action accordingly is very important.

  2. I like your blog but it is not compatible to chrome so i think you should take care of it.Anyway good report.Great to know about such reporting features.But i think report is not enough one should do proper analysis of that report and take proper action accordingly is very important.

  3. Hi found your blog searching for Piwik troubles. I am using Piwik on our company website. Since the last upgrade Piwik is showing no data (from the first of May). Any idea how I can fix this?

  4. Hi found your blog searching for Piwik troubles. I am using Piwik on our company website. Since the last upgrade Piwik is showing no data (from the first of May). Any idea how I can fix this?

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