Add analytics to your Wiki 📊

Hello Subscriber,

Welcome to the latest edition of our DokuWiki newsletter. We hope you find the updates and information useful. As always, please don’t hesitate to get in touch if you’d like to discuss anything.

Your CosmoCode DokuWiki Team

Statistics Plugin

When rolling out a wiki, it makes sense to keep an eye on how it’s used. A big part of that is paying close attention to the recent changes page and having one or more dedicated wiki gardeners.

A “wiki gardener” is someone who maintains and organizes the knowledge base by updating content, fixing formatting, and ensuring consistency and accuracy. Their work helps keep the wiki clean, easy to navigate, and relevant, preventing outdated or duplicated information from accumulating. By doing so, wiki gardeners enhance the wiki’s usefulness as a reliable resource for employees, supporting better collaboration, productivity, and knowledge sharing across the organization.

But there's also a more technical way to look at wiki use: through access statistics. Seeing which pages are frequently visited, what people search for, or even which user groups are most active can help you understand your wiki better.

For a long time, there was no adequate mechanism to do so.

• One option is the statdisplay plugin. It can analyze your web server logs and show some basic statistics and graphs. However, it does not put a specific focus on wiki interactions.

• Another option is plugins like googleanalytics or numatomo, which use an external analytics tool to log visitor information. Again, these tools are more focused on public website analytics than wiki use.

• The third option was the no longer maintained statistics plugin. The plugin tracks typical website analytics metrics like referring links, visitors, and browsers, but it also focuses on wiki specifics like editors vs. readers, search phrases, logins, etc.

We're happy to announce that CosmoCode has adopted the statistics plugin and given it a proper overhaul. It is now much easier to install since it no longer relies on an external MySQL database - all data is stored in SQLite. The underlying data schema has been improved and the outdated graphing library replaced. In addition, the plugin now offers fine-grained privacy options to adjust it to your individual requirements (for example, GDPR or your works council). It also includes support for typical UTM parameters to track individual marketing campaigns.

The new plugin is available as a preview to all our DokuWiki Business Plugin Partnership partners.

Plugin Updates

We made some smaller updates to various plugins:

• structpublish - we now properly differentiate between editors (people who may write in a namespace) and publishers (people who approve changes), which makes the setup a bit easier and more in line with users' expectations.

• farmer - improvements in handling Animal URLs when running command-line plugins.

• sprintdoc - better print styles and several minor CSS adjustments.

• dbquery - new placeholders in the config allow for more complex setups when using a wiki farm.

• tagging - compatibility fixes for modern PHP and the latest DokuWiki release.

If you use any of these plugins, make sure to update to access these new features and fixes. Feel free to contact us if you want to learn more about using these or other plugins in your wiki.

Spotlight on TYPO3: Viridium Group

At CosmoCode, we not only support DokuWiki but also execute a wide range of complex web projects for our clients. We thought you might be interested in reading about one of them.

Our colleagues from the TYPO3 CMS team recently completed a major relaunch and refactoring project for the Viridium Group. After Viridium acquired several insurance companies, both their own website and those of their new subsidiaries required a complete overhaul. The existing TYPO3 system was upgraded to the latest release, the site structure was reorganized, and the subsidiaries were integrated into the main instance - much like a wiki farm.

Custom Content Elements were developed to enable editors to reuse content across different navigation elements and sites, significantly improving both efficiency and consistency. The design was created in close cooperation with Viridium's brand agency, ensuring a consistent message throughout.

A key focus of the refactoring was the integration of a third-party remote API by Morningstar, a leading provider of financial research and analysis. Completely redesigned form mechanisms now allow customers to modify their life insurance fund allocations based on Morningstar data. This feature required close collaboration with various Viridium departments and obtained approval from Germany’s financial regulatory authority, BaFin.

Contact us if you could benefit from CosmoCode's TYPO3 expertise, whether you are starting a new project or planning to relaunch or upgrade an existing site.