Alchemy plugin : Google Analytics reporting

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Adding Google analytics to your website is fairly easy. You need a google analytics account, some javascript, add that to your website html, et voila, you can track your visitors.

Off course, someone needs to analyse this data, see how many visitors your site gets, see where they come from, …

Google provides a website where you can see all this, but it might not always be easy for users to work with that tool.

This Alchemy plugin allows you to see Google analytics data for your website, right from your Tridion CM GUI. It adds a Google Analytics dashboard in the publication dialog.

SiteAnalytics

To get this working, you need to perform the following tasks

  • Install the plugin from the Alchemy webstore
  • Create a new Google API key (for this, you need a google account).
    • Go to https://console.developers.google.com/, log in with your google account, and create a new project
    • In the project, open the API page, find the Analytics API and enable it.API console
    • Once it’s enabled, you should see a usage report for this API. As it’s only just created, you won’t see much here
      Enabled Analytics API
    • Next, open the credentials window. Here, you need to create a new service credential, to let Tridion access your Analytics API account. To do this, click the ‘Create new client ID’ button. In the popup, choose a ‘service account’.Create new Credential
    • When it’s created, you should see a new service account Client ID, email address etc.
      New client IDYou will need the Email address and you should also click the ‘Generate new P12 key’ button. This will download a file to your local machine.
    • Now, open your google analytics dashboard, and add a new user. Here, you should add the email address you received with your new service account. The account only needs read rights.
    • With this data, go back to your Tridion machine.
      Create a new metadata schema with the following fields (you can also add these fields to an existing metadata schema). The metadata schema should be applied to a publication.

      • gaServiceAccount (text field)
      • keyPath (text field)
      • gaProfile (text field)
    • Now, open a publication, and apply this metadata schema to it. You have to fill in the fields as follows :
      • The service account field should contain the e-mail address you got earlier.
      • The keyPath field should point to the p12 file you downloaded earlier. This file should be copied on your Tridion server. The field should contain the full path (c:\my-key-folder\my-service-key-file.p12).
      • The gaProfile should contain your google analytics profile ID. You can get this by logging in to the google analytics site (where you added that service account email earlier), and get the profile ID from the url.
        GoogleProfileID
        The number after the p in the url is your profile ID
      • Once you have this set up, save and close your publication, and reopen it.
        When your alchemy plugin is active, you should see a new tab in your publication dialog “Google Analytics”, and when opening it, you should see a number of graphs for your website usage

 

Tips :

If you have multiple publications for different websites, you could configure each publication separately to show analytics for one specific website.

Future improvements

Currently, the dashboard is only showing a couple of graphs. A next version should allow you to  configure this dashboard, so you can select which data you want to show in the page.

TridionRsaProtectedConfigurationProvider, and the Art of Zen

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And it's Monday. Just sayin'.

And it’s Monday. Just sayin’.

“R-S-A protected configuration provider?! What the f#$k is that, and why the f#$k is it dying an inglorious death while taking my CM with it?!” Those words, friends, are mine. It’s a rare issue that can make me angry enough to club a baby seal silently whisper expletives at an inanimate object, but it’s Monday. And I’ve had coffee… lots of coffee. Y’see, I’ve recently been involved in upgrading an entire organization’s mission-critical servers from 2011 to 2013. For the most part, as we all hope in such circumstances, it’s been a breeze; nothing to set the pulse aflutter. Until today. And that terrible, miserable, unhelpful exception provided by ASP.NET.

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Alchemy Front End Development Tip

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alchemyRecently I’ve been spending all my spare time working on a plugin for the Alchemy Webstore. My plugin needs a popup page to display some information and controls, so I’ve added a simple aspx page, along with a css and js file to give it a little bit of pizazz. Unfortunately for me, I have a very iterative approach to front end development, constantly tweaking my html and css as I get my page looking how I picture it, which with Alchemy means rebuilding my plugin and reinstalling it over and over again. Or does it? Continue reading →

My first Alchemy Plugin

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abort-publishing-iconSo I wanted to make a really simple Alchemy plugin to test out the amazing new SDL Web plugin store that my colleagues have been working on this year.  It’s a simple plugin where I inject a little bit of javascript into the publish dialog to permanently check the ‘Abort Publishing’ check-box button, but it’s a great learning experiment plus its a nice example if you’re looking to write a plugin that simply adds a bit of javascript or css etc.

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Content Delivery on Redhat Linux with Oracle 12c – Part 1

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part1

This is the first in a three part series on setting up Tridion Content Delivery on Redhat Linux with an Oracle 12c database.

Read part two of the guide that steps through the Oracle Database installation and part three that deals with the Tridion Content Delivery database installation.

SDL’s Tridion documentation does not go very deep into the set up of Content Delivery in a Linux environment and I have found little content out in the community around this. I thought that it would be valuable to create a few videos that step through the installation of a Redhat Linux server with Oracle 12c for Content Delivery for those with little Linux and Oracle experience. This isn’t intended as a set up guide for a production server (That’s what sysadmins and DBAs live for) but it will give you your own instance of a working Linux/Oracle CD environment that you can play around with.

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Announcing the Alchemy Webstore!

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alchemy-tridion

Content Bloom is pleased to announce the launch of an exciting new product that brings the ease and convenience of your favourite app store to SDL Tridion. The brainchild of Alexander Klock, the master coder who gave the world the Razor Mediator for Tridion, Alchemy is a new system set to revolutionize the way Tridion eXtensions are built and installed. Not only does www.alchemywebstore.com and the Alchemy4Tridion eXtension provide one click access to a number of fully developed and tested plugins to add a range of new functionalities to your Tridion instance, but with the Alchemy framework anyone can develop and share new plugins with unheard of ease. Continue reading →

Exploring ‘Schedule Publish Phases Separately’ Pt. II

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Last week I highlighted a sometimes overlooked Tridion feature, the “Schedule Publish Phases Separately” option in the publishing dialogue. In my post I mentioned that one issue I’d noticed with this feature was what happens when the rendering phase of publishing is successful but deployment fails. In situations like this you’re at risk of losing a lot of rendering, and if you were under a time constraint this can be a pretty big inconvenience. However, with some forethought and just a little creativity, you can recover and take advantage of all the rendering you’ve done.
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