Symphony.

Now that Google have opened up their Analytics api as reported at http://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/04/attention-developers-google-analytics.html I think this would make for a really cool and killer extension. Especially when selling into clients etc...

Any takers? :-P

Go for it ;-)

I'd also be interested — collaboration perhaps?

I'm wondering what direction this extension would take for it to be useful. On the one hand it could expose stats and graphs within the Symphony backend itself. Cool, but ultimately not that useful, since our own offering would only be a fraction of the power of GA. Besides, the GA interface serves this task well enough.

How about a different direction — a suite of Data Sources to expose this data in a Symphony-friendly way? This would allow a developer to build statistics into the front-end of the site if they wish, and would also allow another developer to build a GUI extension for the backend.

I'd be willing to contribute to this in whatever way possible...

I think Nick is right to steer away from the idea of trying too hard to expose stats and graphs in the backend, though there may be some very basic bits one could pull in. I haven't even seen the API yet, but like Nick, I'd be more interested in figuring out interesting ways to use the information contextually, whether on the frontend or the backend. The difficulty of course is that Symphony, unlike most CMSes, doesn't inherently treat its content entries as if they were just pages—so entries don't map one-to-one onto URLs. Still, I'm sure you could figure out ways to do stuff like generate a list of most popular URLs for a particular Symphony page, and so on...

Is GA still the best solution out there? Not surpassed by getclicky desktop, or mint?

There is an example linked from the page above where a CMS has integrated it into their system http://www.axiomcms.com/google-analytics-integration . I think this is a perfect example of how to take advantage of the API.

I think GA integration in the Symphony back-end would be very useful for users from a simplicity point of view.

As czheng says, there is one problem:

Symphony, unlike most CMSes, doesn't inherently treat its content entries as if they were just pages—so entries don't map one-to-one onto URLs.

When generating a lot of dynamic content through URL parameters, it would be nice to have some sort of sitemap of all page URLs including those that can be generated and those defined in Symphony as pages. This would enable us to link "all pages" to URLs, and integrate GA as in Fazal's example.

In Fazal's example above, this could be done in Symphony in two ways:

1. An additional column in the Blueprints > Pages table. Useful for a developer, but this page is hidden for Authors.

2. A "Google Analytics field" that can be added to a section. When added it has a configuration option to choose which page and URL parameter is used to display this entry. For example:

I have a section Blog Posts and a Blog Post page /post/{handle}/. Into this section I add a GA field, choose the Blog Posts page from the drop down, and match up my handle URL parameter to the Title field in the section (somehow).

When viewing the list of entries in the Publish, this URL is resolved and the statistics fetched.

Just a thought.

I'd like to step in with a more general idea that could be applied here: REST datasource.

Similar to an Dynamic Datasource, except a REST datasource would do the following:

1. Allow user to contstruct complete HTTP request (headers, etc)
2. Supply some basic php utlilty to do things like MD5 or SHA hashing
3. Possibly allow an intermediate xsl transform to allow user to form the datasource as they wish.

With something like this, you could develop the datasources Nick mentioned for not just Google, but all sorts of APIs.