Matomo Analytics

[Discourse]

	Summary	Matomo Analytics is a script to enable Matomo analytics on Discourse.
	Repository Link	https://github.com/discourse/discourse-matomo-analytics
	New to Discourse Themes?	Beginner’s guide to using Discourse Themes

Install this theme component

As this is an official theme component maintained by the Discourse team, Support, Bug, UX, and Feature requests can be made in the respective categories here on Meta, and tagged with the appropriate theme component tag. Click on a link below to get one started.

 Support  Bug  UX  Feature

Features

Matomo is an open source analytics platform. Users can choose between self-hosting or paying for professional hosting in the cloud.

Matomo was formerly named Piwik. See Piwik is now Matomo - Announcement - Analytics Platform - Matomo for details about the name change.

To enable Matomo analytics on your Discourse forum, all you have to do is install the official theme component.

Valid for Matomo API v1.5 and newer

1. Follow the theme installation guide to import from the following URL:

   https://github.com/discourse/discourse-matomo-analytics.git
   

   And you will see

   

2. Enter the Host URL and Website ID

   

3. Add the theme component “Matomo Analytics” to your active theme(s).

   

That’s it!

Settings

Name	Description
host url	Host URL without http:// or https://
website id
exclude groups	Comma separated list of groups to exclude from tracking such as admins, staff
user id tracking	An indentifying field name on the current user object such as id, username or external_id.
subdomain tracking	Track visitors across main domain & subdomains, assuming discourse is on a subdomain.
do not track	So tracking requests will not be sent if visitors do not wish to be tracked.
disable cookies	Disables all first party cookies. Existing Matomo cookies for this website will be deleted on the next pageview.

Credits

Thanks to @mattab & @brahn @tagtomat and @simon

Hosted by us? Theme components are available to use on our Standard, Business, and Enterprise plans.

Last edited by @david 2025-01-09T09:44:19Z

Check document

Perform check on document:

[chrisblech (Christoph Blechschmitt)]

Thanks for this howto, works fine for me.

In order to comply with the European laws, users must have the possibility to reject piwik’s cookie. Piwik offers a really simple solution for this, by including an IFrame.

Unfortunately, Discourse doesn’t allow iframe tags in posts…
Does anyone see a way to include this piwik iframe in Discourse TOS ?
Thanks.

[xrav3nz]

I just created a new “Matomo Analytics” theme component, and updated the instructions on how to set it up.

Could you give it a try? Please also remember to remove the original custom scripts.

[some-user]

Looks good on first sight. No error in javascript console. Requests to piwik.php being in the webserver log again.

Statistics in Matomo are available as well.

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

Is this iframe thing still a concern?

[chrisblech (Christoph Blechschmitt)]

Hey @xrav3nz your component works great - thanks!

@sam

Is this iframe thing still a concern?

Yes it is. Opt-out should be possible, and Matomo provides this via including an iFrame: see Matomo documentation

[Patrick_David (Pat David)]

This doesn’t appear to be working for me at the moment? I can add the component, and add the correct URL and siteid, but it doesn’t render anything:

I added the comments around the code to find it quicker in the page:

[darix]

We are on beta 6+git1 on our instance

[xrav3nz]

Inline JavaScripts in themes and components are automatically extracted to an external “theme JavaScript” file.

Could you try checking the one immediately after your comments?

[Patrick_David (Pat David)]

This is at the main page on https://discuss.pixls.us:

Edit
Hold on, I’ve got a new hash on the file on recent refresh, it looks like the code is there. Thank you @xrav3nz!

Looks like it’s working now - not sure what I was doing wrong yesterday - user error.

[downey (Michael Downey)]

So I have the JS loaded into the theme customizations, and the external “theme JavaScript file”* is linked in my test browser, just under where I inserted it like in the screenshot in a few posts earlier … BUT the requests aren’t coming through to the Matomo tracking web server.

(Tracking works fine for other non-Discourse sites, FWIW.)

Has anyone else seen that happen?

---

* e.g. https://discourse-cdn.example.com/standard11/theme-javascripts/{numeric_string}.js?__ws=my-discourse-forum.example.org

[surety (Ryan)]

Thanks for the component!

I’m confused why the tracking code is sending a custom variable called Anonymous. Isn’t that custom for your particular Matomo setup? It doesn’t seem like it should be there for everyone.

_paq.push(['setCustomVariable', 1, 'Anonymous', !currentUser, 'visit']);

I added a few lines so that it would track visitors between discourse on a subdomain and a main site. Happy to send a pull request if you want it.

[goaround]

Vous devez ajouter votre URL Matomo à la liste blanche dans l’en-tête Content-Security-Policy. Recherchez le paramètre d’administration content_security_policy_script_src et ajoutez votre domaine (avec https://) à cet endroit.

[danb35 (Dan)]

J’ai du mal à faire fonctionner cela sur mon installation. J’ai installé le composant et l’ai ajouté à mon thème, mais Matomo indique qu’il n’y a pas de données pour le site. Je pensais avoir les paramètres corrects :

Mais je vois cette erreur dans la console de mon navigateur :

…et lorsque je consulte le site dans Matomo, j’obtiens ceci :

Qu’est-ce que j’oublie ?

Édition : Des investigations supplémentaires révèlent que l’erreur dans la console JavaScript n’apparaît que dans Firefox, pas dans Chrome (avec les dernières versions de chacun sur un Mac). Et je vois maintenant certains résultats dans Matomo, bien que Firefox soit remarquablement absent ; tous les visiteurs sauf un utilisent Chrome ; la seule exception utilise Safari.

[danb35 (Dan)]

Des idées à ce sujet ? Ce post :

Tracking not working in Firefox

suggère qu’il pourrait s’agir des paramètres « Ne pas me suivre » de Firefox, mais même lorsque je les désactive pour mon site, j’obtiens la même erreur dans la console web avec Firefox. Et Firefox ne semble de toute façon pas considérer cela comme un traqueur :

[goaround]

Essayez de supprimer le dernier / de “https://www.familybrown.org/analytics/” → “https://www.familybrown.org/analytics”

[danb35 (Dan)]

Merci. Malheureusement, je rencontre toujours la même erreur :

[goaround]

Pourriez-vous me donner l’URL de votre forum ?

[danb35 (Dan)]

SpareOom

[eextra (Sylwia)]

Ces deux champs doivent-ils être remplis ? Je ne les comprends pas vraiment.