Hi Team, building on the referrers/tracking issue we discussed last August:
1.) I think we should more smoothly support Google Analytics tracking
(or any other company's tracking[2][3], the configuration should work
the same) by providing a "tracking key" field configurable at both the
blog admin and individual blog level setting screen. The "tracking key"
value at the blog admin level will serve as the default for all blogs
unless overridden at the blog-level; also, the blog admin configuration
will have a yes/no checkbox on whether to allow individual blog
overrides; if "no" the option to provide a tracking key will not appear
at the blog level. (This catch will be imperfect as users can still
override the tracking key by altering their templates if the admin gives
them the ability to alter their own templates.) Then, I'll provide a
velocity macro that will output either the admin-level or
individual-blog level tracking key based on the logic above, and add
that macro to each of the themes that Roller ships with that macro. How
does this all sound?
2.) Wordpress' direction seems to be to directly incorporate Google
Analytics, having both free
(http://wordpress.org/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress/) and paid
(https://premium.wpmudev.org/project/google-analytics-for-wordpress-mu-sitewide-and-single-blog-solution/)
options, rather than roll-their-own like we do with our referral
tracking. We don't incorporate GA like they do, but that's OK for now
as it's easy to log into Google Analytics anyway.
I'm wondering if after #1 above is done if this would be a good time to
remove Roller's home-grown embedded referral tracking. What we
presently have--a tracker that keeps just the last 24 hours before
resetting to zero, is not in the same league with Google Analytics or
other specialized tools today in terms of its mining and data storage
capabilities and we may be doing more harm than good to the project by
retaining it (if the functionality is not core, as here, it's frequently
better to have nothing and instead integrate well with third party
specialized tools than retain something that's missing too much to be
useful.) As Dave mentioned earlier our homegrown product does allow
bloggers to attach referrers to each blog entry during the 24 hours
(something we would lose if we got rid of it) but I don't know of anyone
doing that today, Roller or any other blogging tool.
I think it's safe to say nobody here has the time or inclination to
improve on our home-grown referrer tracking while there are so many fine
3rd party tools already out there giving us what we need. Removing it
pushes the focus towards improving Roller's ability to integrate with
3rd party trackers and put energy instead into more fruitful areas of
the code (theme modernization and planet functionality improvement in
particular) Strategically, it doesn't seem good for a webapp to
roll-its-own referrer tracking; either the homegrown referrer tracking
ends up looking subpar to the 3rd party specialized tools, or so much
effort is made trying to duplicate specialized products that the core
functionality of the WAR--i.e., for us, a blogging tool--suffers.
WDYT? If team members are still unsure, we can table this issue for
another year, or what we can do is delete it in trunk but be open to
restoring it if we get sufficient clamor for its return.
Regards,
Glen
[1]
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2051368/4-simpler-alternatives-to-google-analytics.html
[2] http://piwik.org/what-is-piwik/